The Ancient Wars

Unarguably, the holy war of the geeks centers around the Vi vs Emacs debate—which is the editor to rule them all?

No, this post is not about ending that war, or even trying to. This is just a response to my amazement at how deep rooted this war continues to be in our community.

So this wednesday as I was waiting in the hallway to meet with Amin, I heard him say something about Vi and Emacs to one of his students and how none of these editors even close in terms of productivity when compared to the mature IDEs (such as Visual Studio or Eclipse) for serious programming. I used to be a devout Emacs user for a long time (around 4 years) before I moved to Vim, and I’ve never been happier.

Naturally when I went in, I asked him about his take on Vi vs. Emacs. Turns out that Amin is a devout Emacs user, right from his undergrad days. Apparently in his time Vim was not popular, and Vi does kind of suck in a way compared to Vim. Being the good Vim lover that I am, I engaged him with all the neat things that my Vim setup could do, and he was genuinely surprised, and happily, interested too! So its quite likely that I might have to give him a demo of what Vim can do these days very soon :)

Here are some nice reads:

• Vi lovers page
• Emacs and Vi (note the and, instead of the usual vs)
• Newsforge article on the holy geek war
• Suck-o-meter