Using both Vim and Emacs for quite a bit of time I have finally made a decision what editor to stick to. I started with Emacs, but gave Vim a try and it really satisfied me.
And here are the points relevant for me:
- It is deliciously easy to make key mappings in Vim.
- Vim color schemes work both in GUI and console.
- Vim config works almost identically for both GUI and console.
- Sessions in Vim are much better stored than in Emacs (I mean, even tabs and windows are saved along with whole the environment, not only buffers).
- By default Emacs lacks modality and this is the biggest disadvantage. Default keybindings on Emacs are just horrible (even physically painful, to be honest), I really see no reason for this complexity over simplicity given by modality.
- Even on my MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM Emacs happens to be slow somehow.
- Vim has tabs out of box. A small number of tabs is not evil, when you have kind of 50 buffers open :)
However, there are things I definitely liked in Emacs:
- ELPA. Of course, I use vundle, but ELPA makes me kind of envy Emacs users.
- Nice buffer management out of box.
- Elisp. I have never tried vimscript and I hope integration with Python will be much improved in Vim 7.4.
There is also an interesting analogy between Vim and Emacs. Vim commands prefixed with ':' are like Meta-x commands in Emacs. However Emacs doesn't allow commands arguments before RETURN.
To conclude, Emacs has better eco system, but it requires too much configuration to get what I need from it (first of all, I mean modality), while Vim originally was better designed for day-to-day usage. Of course, there is nothing that is in Vim that cannot be done in Emacs. So if you are fine just with tuning the editor, you may want to choose Vim as I did. However, when you actually want to write an editor for your needs then, probably, you should go with Emacs.
Here are my configurations for Vim and Emacs with Evil, forks of Vim netbeans and Emacs starter kit respectively.
https://github.com/masterdezign/vim-netbeans
https://github.com/masterdezign/emacs-starter-kit
And here are the points relevant for me:
- It is deliciously easy to make key mappings in Vim.
- Vim color schemes work both in GUI and console.
- Vim config works almost identically for both GUI and console.
- Sessions in Vim are much better stored than in Emacs (I mean, even tabs and windows are saved along with whole the environment, not only buffers).
- By default Emacs lacks modality and this is the biggest disadvantage. Default keybindings on Emacs are just horrible (even physically painful, to be honest), I really see no reason for this complexity over simplicity given by modality.
- Even on my MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM Emacs happens to be slow somehow.
- Vim has tabs out of box. A small number of tabs is not evil, when you have kind of 50 buffers open :)
However, there are things I definitely liked in Emacs:
- ELPA. Of course, I use vundle, but ELPA makes me kind of envy Emacs users.
- Nice buffer management out of box.
- Elisp. I have never tried vimscript and I hope integration with Python will be much improved in Vim 7.4.
There is also an interesting analogy between Vim and Emacs. Vim commands prefixed with ':' are like Meta-x commands in Emacs. However Emacs doesn't allow commands arguments before RETURN
To conclude, Emacs has better eco system, but it requires too much configuration to get what I need from it (first of all, I mean modality), while Vim originally was better designed for day-to-day usage. Of course, there is nothing that is in Vim that cannot be done in Emacs. So if you are fine just with tuning the editor, you may want to choose Vim as I did. However, when you actually want to write an editor for your needs then, probably, you should go with Emacs.
Here are my configurations for Vim and Emacs with Evil, forks of Vim netbeans and Emacs starter kit respectively.
https://github.com/masterdezign/vim-netbeans
https://github.com/masterdezign/emacs-starter-kit