Emacs and Vim User Interface
Vim uses editing modes - most commonly the command mode and insert mode. Vim aims to minimize the number of keystrokes that a user has to press, because vi, upon which Vim is based, was designed to be used over slow terminals.
Emacs uses modifier keys to enable shortcuts, which often involves pressing several keys simultaneously for a single function. This aspect of Emacs is often criticized.
Ease of Learning
Emacs is easier to learn since it has a more natural interface (for users familiar with GUI-based text editors). Since Vim has different editing modes, beginners find it a little harder to learn.
Productivity and Editing Speed
Vim enthusiasts argue that once a user becomes familiar with the editing modes and commands of Vim, it enables far greater productivity and efficiency. File editing is usually faster with Vim than with Emacs because of Vim's purposely speed-driven interface. For example, cursor movement can be controlled through the H, J, K, and L keys in the normal mode. This means the user's hands do not need to leave "home row" position, which improves efficiency, but comes at the price of adding overhead as mode switching is required to choose between movement and text editing. In Emacs (with the default configuration), the user moves the cursor with the Ctrl-B or Ctrl-F shortcuts, which might slow down the novice user since two keys need to be pressed. Productivity and efficiency improvements in Emacs depend upon the configuration of the editing environment rather than the editor itself.
RAM usage of Emacs vs Vim
Vim is lighter than Emacs and uses less memory. Vim advocates criticize Emacs' resource consumption with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Emacs stands for "Eighty Megabytes And Constantly Swapping".
However, with gnuclient, a single persistent Emacs process can be run that can support several clients simultaneously. This speeds startup time and decreases total memory usage, closing the gap between Emacs and Vim.
Extensibility and Customization of Emacs vs Vim
While both Vim and Emacs support plugins that enhance their functionality, Emacs supports a lot more customization of the editor environment. This is arguably the most important feature of emacs and is responsible for much of emacs' devoted following.
Emacs can be extended in elisp, while Vim has its own internal scripting language and supports use of other programming languages for plugin development.
Emacs can be extended on the fly by redefining built-in elisp functions, either by typing the new definition into Emacs or by loading elisp files. Groups of related changes are called "modes", and can be easily configured to be automatically used for particular types of files (buffers). So it is easy to define modes for different programming languages or frameworks such as "lisp mode" or "Ruby on Rails mode" or "PHP mode". These modes can directly modify even core behaviors of Emacs, automatically format or colorize text and add standard template or "boilerplate" text such as function declarations and closures. So programmers find Emacs to be far more customizable to their particular requirements than Vim. Yet some programmers may find Vim to ultimately be better suited to their programming environment due to its equally customizable and fully modal operation.
Vim can also be extended on the fly by using the command mode. The command mode allows configuration options to be set, functions to be defined, and macros to be made. In fact, configuration files for Vim are just commands that can be input through the command mode.
Graphical User Interface (GUI)
Both Vim and Emacs have graphical user interfaces. Virtually all menu items on the graphical interface for both editors are simply ways to handle a shortcut command or quick configuration. The GUIs for the editors do not provide virtually any additional functions beyond those available in the CLI (command line interface)
Emacs uses XDisplay or gtk2 for its GUI. Vim can use many other GUI libraries, such as gtk, gnome, gnome2, motif, athena and neXtaw, in addition to gtk2.
References
FAQs
Emacs, with its extensive features, is ideal for those who prefer a single, integrated development environment. Since Vim is more, it's preferred by those who need a powerful editor that integrates seamlessly into different environments and workflows.
What is an advantage of vi over Emacs? ›
vi is a smaller and faster program, but with less capacity for customization. vim has evolved from vi to provide significantly more functionality and customization than vi, making it comparable to Emacs. vi start-up time is near instantaneous for small text files, while vim is almost as fast. User environment.
Why is Emacs so great? ›
Emacs is Fast
Once its navigation commands are baked into muscle memory, your cursor practically moves on its own. Routine editing tasks are a breeze, almost every development tool you could desire is right where you need it, and there are is no discernible lag or hangup in any part of the program.
Is Vim still the best? ›
Vim is still the most efficient way to edit text.
Another reason to come back to Vim, even in 2023, is that it's still one of the most efficient available options to edit text. While sophisticated editors like Visual Studio Code (VS Code) have come a long way, there's still no great replacement for Vim.
Do people still use Emacs? ›
It's true that Emacs was at one point one of the two most popular text editors in the world, but those days are long gone and there's little point in dwelling on them. Still, today it probably has a lot more users in absolute terms than in the 80s and early 90s.
Do professionals use Vim? ›
A lot of best developers use VIM or Emacs, but also a lot use any other popular code editor. I know many great developers that don't bother with VIM or Emacs at all. They say that an editor is only a tool and like any other tool, it should be easy to use and easy to replace when better will appear in the market.
What is the downside of Emacs? ›
Emacs Cons:
If you want to customize Emacs you'll need to learn Emacs Lisp which introduces a whole new learning curve. Not available everywhere by default. If you need to edit files on a system that you don't have root access to and emacs isn't installed, then you'll end up using vim.
What is Emacs best for? ›
Emacs is at its core a Lisp machine with a pre-written text editing framework, which I and some others think results in the best text editor in the world. As a Lisp machine, it can be extended with Lisp code. That Lisp code can be anything, including an IDE.
Are Emacs worth anything? ›
Learning Emacs and org-mode are one of the most worthwhile things I've ever done. I'm not joking, it was quite literally life-changing and mind-opening. It's about as big a change as learning about an OS other than Windows for the first time, or learning programming for the first time.
Why is Emacs so hard to use? ›
Some commands cannot be accessed through a menu, but ALL commands can be invoked from the keyboard. Unfortunately, this is where emacs gets its bad reputation. Emacs often uses multiple key combinations where some keys have to be "modified" by also pressing the control or esc keys first.
Vim has been maintained for years, even after NeoVim popped on the scene. The main contention point these days seems to be Vim's choice of vimscript 9 instead of Lua as chosen by NeoVim.
Why is Vim still used? ›
Vim is the only editor that optimizes editing text instead of writing from a blank page. That's another reason Vim makes you so efficient: you have different modes for each phase of your current work or task. Normal mode is for reading code and navigating quickly.
Why use Vim in 2024? ›
With the right plugins and configurations, VIM transcends its text editor origins to become a full-fledged IDE. This versatility ensures that whether you're coding, compiling, or debugging, everything you need is just a command away.
Is Vim better than Emacs? ›
Speed is the main difference between Emacs and Vim. Vim is faster because it starts up in less time. Vim's deliberate speed gives it an edge over Emacs when editing files. Many users claim that learning how Vim works speeds up their productivity since they become more efficient with the different modes and commands.
Do people use Vim at Google? ›
Does Google use Vim or Emacs for C++ development? - Quora. Yes. And about a half-dozen others that I've seen. There are two web-based internal IDEs as well, one of which works for C++; most of the time I use that with its keybindings in Vim mode.
Is Vim better than IDEs? ›
Understanding the Underlying Processes: While IDEs provide powerful debugging and automation features, they often abstract away the intricate details of program execution. Vim, being a lightweight text editor, encourages a deeper understanding of the underlying processes.
Is Emacs the best text editor? ›
Emacs is one of the best text editors that let us edit and write source codes faster and easier. It might be very challenging to start using any editors like Emacs, but it is definitely worth to spend some time to learn the first steps.
What's better than Vim? ›
The Vim editor is a successor to the vi editor found on the original UNIX. As a fork of Vim, Neovim is an editor that aims to improve the quality of life for all developers, better than Vim. Vim is an excellent choice for experienced sysadmins. However, NeoVim has gathered a significant following among developers.
Is Emacs a good IDE? ›
emacs now is a lot better than 5 years. So may be in 10 years it will really rival more modern competitors in terms of performance. Having said all this, emacs universality and extensibility keep me with it. The asyncness of Intellij IDEs annoys me at times.
