Arguing that Vim or Neovim run faster than Emacs is like saying that your single-engine sport aircraft moves faster than my best aircraft carrier. An average Emacs user installs and loads a few hundred packages, ranging from Org-mode and version control extensions to PDF tools, and natural language assistants. I bet Vim wouldn't be "faster" if you feed it up with even half of that number of plugins.
Vim and Emacs have different use-cases, philosophies and mechanics. Each has its own pros and cons. There's no point in debating if one has better speed, aesthetics or popularity. I suggest we stop this nonsensical debate of Vim vs. Emacs and instead focus on their strength.
What people very often miss is that both Vim and Emacs are absolutely free. Free to use, free to copy, free to change. And that freedom is worth protecting and worth fighting for. Because no matter how MSFT, JetBrains, et al. paint it - VSCode and IntelliJ are not free products. And not just the money at stake here - the entire ideology and the idea of being a hacker with control over computational power and the tools is something worth protecting. I (just like many others) am so fed up with proprietary services and corporations taking your data hostage. Tired of being locked in and losing control over my data; tired of the status quo, of that infamous: "people don't know what they want..."
I chose Vim & Emacs not because they are technologically superior to VSCode or IntelliJ (even though they are), but because I've seen the other side. I've used Jetbrains' products for many years. I loved them, blindly. Do you know what grants you a huge amount of satisfaction? Not when you see that bug ticket you filed in 2008 gets finally fixed in IntelliJ, fourteen years later (by that time you're already forced to learn how to avoid the workflow leading to that bug).
Satisfaction is what you feel when you learn Emacs to the point that even though you know there's a bug, you've accumulated enough knowledge to sit down and figure out a workaround for it, writing fifty lines of Lisp. That's freedom. That's being a programmer. Choosing to pay for a proprietary product and ecosystem (because it has emojis and pizzzaz) is like jumping into a slow melting pot; willingly checking-in into a mental prison.
> Arguing that Vim or Neovim run faster than Emacs is like saying that your single-engine sport aircraft moves faster than my best aircraft carrier.
Vim vs. Emacs debates these days remind me of a story I read about an F-16 pilot and an A-10 Warthog pilot sitting in a bar, debating the merits of their respective planes. At one point the F-16 pilot said something like "Come on, you have to admit that an F-16 with AIM-9 Sidewinders on its pylons is pretty badass!"
The Warthog pilot just smiled. "Do you know what the pylons on my 'Hog are meant to carry?" he said. "F-16s."
I've long considered Emacs to be the Warthog of editors: big, ugly, a little outdated, but absolutely your best friend when it comes to certain big ugly jobs (and nothing else comes close). These days it comes with a pretty decent implementation of much of Vim, so it really is like a Warthog carrying a pair of F-16s. That said, it also has in common with the Warthog that its number is coming up and it is probably soon to be retired permanently because the landscape has evolved out from underneath it.
> What people very often miss is that both Vim and Emacs are absolutely free. Free to use, free to copy, free to change. And that freedom is worth protecting and worth fighting for. Because no matter how MSFT, JetBrains, et al. paint it - VSCode and IntelliJ are not free products. And not just the money at stake here - the entire ideology and the idea of being a hacker with control over computational power and the tools is something worth protecting. I (just like many others) am so fed up with proprietary services and corporations taking your data hostage. Tired of being locked in and losing control over my data; tired of the status quo, of that infamous: "people don't know what they want..."
Most developers use Visual Studio Code. IntelliJ is still largely considered a must for development in Java-family languages. Microsoft and JetBrains are doing something right. It may be the case that people really don't know what they want. Whatever the case, if you work as a professional and do not use the tools that maximize your productivity, you are leaving money on the table.
> That said, it also has in common with the Warthog that its number is coming up and it is probably soon to be retired permanently because the landscape has evolved out from underneath it.
Do you think so?
Unlike the Warthog, Emacs has also been evolving. Doesn’t LSP close a large part of the gap with IDEs?
Emacs still has no parallel multithreading, very poor async support, lots of global state everywhere, and you still have to contend with Emacs Lisp. So no, I say it hasn't evolved to keep up with the state of the art.
Vim and Emacs have different use-cases, philosophies and mechanics. Each has its own pros and cons. There's no point in debating if one has better speed, aesthetics or popularity. I suggest we stop this nonsensical debate of Vim vs. Emacs and instead focus on their strength.
What people very often miss is that both Vim and Emacs are absolutely free. Free to use, free to copy, free to change. And that freedom is worth protecting and worth fighting for. Because no matter how MSFT, JetBrains, et al. paint it - VSCode and IntelliJ are not free products. And not just the money at stake here - the entire ideology and the idea of being a hacker with control over computational power and the tools is something worth protecting. I (just like many others) am so fed up with proprietary services and corporations taking your data hostage. Tired of being locked in and losing control over my data; tired of the status quo, of that infamous: "people don't know what they want..."
I chose Vim & Emacs not because they are technologically superior to VSCode or IntelliJ (even though they are), but because I've seen the other side. I've used Jetbrains' products for many years. I loved them, blindly. Do you know what grants you a huge amount of satisfaction? Not when you see that bug ticket you filed in 2008 gets finally fixed in IntelliJ, fourteen years later (by that time you're already forced to learn how to avoid the workflow leading to that bug).
Satisfaction is what you feel when you learn Emacs to the point that even though you know there's a bug, you've accumulated enough knowledge to sit down and figure out a workaround for it, writing fifty lines of Lisp. That's freedom. That's being a programmer. Choosing to pay for a proprietary product and ecosystem (because it has emojis and pizzzaz) is like jumping into a slow melting pot; willingly checking-in into a mental prison.