Vim vs Emacs

When compared to modern graphical editors like Atom and Brackets (which have underlying HTML5 engines, browsers, Node, etc.), Vim uses a sliver of the system's memory and it loads instantly, all the while delivering the same features. Vim is also faster than Emacs.

Vim is open-source, GPL-compatible charityware.

Unlike other editors such as Sublime Text, Vim is a command line editor and hence can be used in remote development environments like Chromebooks via SSH.

Vi/vim exists on almost all Unix-like platforms. It's the de-facto Unix editor and is easily installed on Windows. All you need to make it work is a text-based connection, so it works well for remote machines with slow connections, or when you're too lazy to set up a VNC/Remote Desktop connection.

There's no need to reach for the mouse or the Ctrl/Alt buttons again. Everything is a mere key press or two away with almost 200 functions specifically for text editing. Vim does support the mouse, but it's designed so you don't have to use it for greater efficiency.
Versions of Vim, like gVim or MacVim, still allow you to use the mouse and familiar platform shortcuts. That can help ease the learning curve and you'll probably find you won't want to (or need to) use the mouse after a while.

Vim's keyset is mainly restricted to the alphanumeric keys and the escape key. This is an enduring relic of its teletype heritage, but has the effect of making my ost of Vim's functionality accessible without frequent awkward finger reaches.

Many text editors have programmable macros, but since Vim is keyboard-based, your programmed macros are usually far more predictable and easier to understand.

As it loads the whole file into RAM, replacing all string occurrences in 100 MB+ files is quick and easy. Every other editor has sort of died during that. It is extremely fast even for cold start. Vim is light-weight and very compact. In terminal, it only uses a small amount of memory and anytime you invoke Vim, it's extremely fast. It's immediate, so much so you can't even notice any time lag.

This makes Vim the definitive resource for every environment (Ruby/Rails, Python, C, etc.), or simply just provides more information in your view.

No need to memorize different key combinations for things like deleting the text inside of a block or deleting the text inside of a pair of quotes. It's just a series of actions, or nouns and verbs, or however you prefer to think about it. If you want to delete, you select "d"; if you want it to happen inside something, you select "i"; and if you want the surrounding double-quotes, just select ". But if you were changing the text, or copying it, or anything else, you'd still use the same "i" and ". This makes it very easy to remember a large number of different extremely useful commands, without the effort it takes to remember all of the Emacs "magic incantations", for example.

Vimtutor is an excellent interactive tutorial for people with no prior experience of Vim. It takes about 30 minutes to complete.

Vimscript provides a rich scripting functionality to build upon the core of Vim. When combined with things like Tim Pope's Pathogen plugin management system, it becomes easy to add support for syntax, debugging, build systems, git, and more.

If you happen to be logged into SSH, you can use Vim in a terminal. It can also run with a GUI too.

And will be supported for many years to come.

Vim's somewhat steep learning curve is more than made up for once you've mastered a few basic concepts and learned the tricks that allow you to program faster with fewer cut/paste mistakes.

The fact that very few, if any, people claim to be a "Vim Master" is a testament to the breadth and depth of Vim. There is always something new to learn - a new, perhaps more efficient, way to use it. This prevents Vim from ever feeling stale. It's always fresh.

Vim allows users to include many features found in IDEs and competing editors, but does not force them all on the user. This not only helps keep it lighter in weight than a lot of other options, but it also helps ensure that some unused features will not get in the way.

Interaction with Vim is centered around several "modes", where purpose and keybindings differ in each.
Insert mode is for entering text. This mode most resembles traditional text entry in most editors.
Normal mode (the default) is entered by hitting ESC and converts all keybindings to center around movement within the file, search, pane selection, etc.
Command mode is entered by hitting ":" in Normal mode and allows you to execute Vim commands and scripts similar in fashion to a shell.
Visual mode is for selecting lines, blocks, and characters of code.
Those are the major modes, and several more exist depending on what one defines as a "mode" in Vim.

All Linux distributions out there will have Vim built into them, which is highly convenient!

If you use Vim long enough, it will rewire your brain to be more efficient.

Vim does not only offer unlimited undo levels, later releases support an undo tree. It eventually gives the editor VCS-like features. You can undo the current file to any point in the past, even if a change was already undone again. Another neat feature is persistent undo, which enables to undo changes after the file was closed and reopened again.

Starting with Vim 8, a package manager has been built into Vim. The package manager helps keep track of installed plugins, their versions and also only loads the needed plugins on startup depending on the file type.

As with all vi-like editors, Vim provides a modal paradigm for text editing and processing that provides a rich syntax and semantic model for composing succinct, powerful commands. While this requires some initial investment in learning how it works in order to take full advantage of its capabilities, it rewards the user well in the long run. This modal interface paradigm also lends itself surprisingly well to many other types of applications that can be controlled by vi-like keybindings, such as browsers, image viewers, media players, network clients (for email and other communication media), and window managers. Even shells (including zsh, tcsh, mksh, and bash, among others) come with vi-like keybinding features that can greatly enhance user comfort and efficiency when the user is familiar with the vi modal editing paradigm.

Since Vim 8, Vim can exchange characters with background processes asynchronously. This avoids the problem of the text editor getting stuck when a plugin that had to communicate with a server was running. Now plugins can send and receive data from external scripts without forcing Vim to freeze.

It is called "registers".

Using vim not just increase your productivity, but helps you flex.

Emacs can be controlled entirely with the keyboard. While true, I often find the mouse and menus handy for those lesser-used commands. An aide-memoir.

Customizations can be made to a wide range of Emacs' functions through a Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). A robust list of existing Lisp extensions include the practical (git integration, syntax highlighting, etc) to the utilitarian (calculators, calendars) to the sublime (chess, Eliza).

You can debug, compile, manage files, integrate with version control systems, etc. All through the various plugins that can be installed.

You can use Emacs' command line interface or graphical user interface.

Emacs has extensive help support built-in as well as a tutorial accessed with C-h t.

Licensed under GNU GPL.

With 30+ years of use the Emacs documentation is very thorough. There are also a lot of tutorials and guides written by third parties.

Evil mode emulates vim behaviors within Emacs. It enables Vi users to move inside the Emacs universe.

Advanced planning and publication which can start as a simple list.

Through its programmability, a very broad range of functionalities can be integrated in emacs, turning it even into a "single point of contact" with the underlying operating system.

Works on Linux, Windows, Macintosh, BSD, and others.

You can jump straight from your org-mode files to programming tasks - and back - and build a seamless workflow.

Emacs is great for everything.

You can pass complicated arguments in the mini buffer.

Fully compliant GNU-emacs is available on many platforms, and they all understand .emacs configuration files.

Emacs can select rectangularly.

With lisp customization, any behavior of Emacs can be changed. Update with pre-release patch can be also applied without recompiling the whole Emacs.

Evil is an extensible vi layer for Emacs. It provides Vim features like Visual selection and text objects.

Dynamic word completion.

Review the "Emacs Rocks" video.

The first verion of Emacs was written in 1974 and GNU Emacs in 1984.

Powerful commands, search, and more with the Helm plugin.

Since version 25 you can run GTK widgets inside Emacs buffers. One of these is the WebKitGTK+, which allows the user to run a full-featured web browser inside Emacs with JavaScript and CSS support among other things.

The tutorial you are presented with at startup shows you exactly what you need to get started and teaches you how to use the built-in help yourself later.

Emacs has a number of shell variants: ansi-term, shell, and eshell.

Complex git history editing become a breeze with very few keystrokes. And simple ones are quickly stashed in muscle memory. Git becomes an direct extension of your brain thanks to Magit. Cherrypicking, blaming, resetting, interactive rebasing, line level commit, spinoff branches... you name it, magit already has it and has typically all those 5 to 10 git CLI commands of higher-level patterns also tide to one simple shortcut (want to amend a commit three commits away ? forgot to branch out and you've got already N commits on master ? ... etc... ).

Managing several large mailing lists has never been easier using Gnus. The threading commands and the various ways of scoring articles means that I never miss important messages/authors, etc. A joy to use.

You can use the underlying operating system shell as a terminal emulation in an Emacs buffer. Don't like the default shell for your configuration? You can change it to your liking.

Built-in packages make editing Lisp source code feel natural.

Missing some neural package that predicts actions, maybe in the next release ...