Vim vs Emacs | Prime Reacts 

the gandalf image is real, it was taken off scene when Ian was just checking his computer while still in his costume

I use VimMacs... to quit I type: SHIFT+ZQ+C-x C-c... which is the opposite of BLAZINGLY FAST! ♥

As an experienced vim user, I prefer the integrated terminal (:terminal) over shelling out (:!) for most use-cases for 2 main reasons: 1. doesn't block vim like `:!cmd` does (I know I can start a split tmux pane or new terminal window to run commands, but this leads to #2) 2. it allows me to take advantage of Vim's built-in completion suggestion engine (insert mode ) to complete a word from another (integrated terminal) buffer. So, I would run tests/linters/compilers via file watchers, or any arbitrary command in a split terminal buffer and get all the completion goodness I come to expect from Vim. This gets me to about 80-90% of my needs for an LSP without the downsides of LSPs.

Emacs with vim keybindings is the real way to go. I can have the same keybings to navigate the terminal, my text editor, my PDFs, my notes, and my to do list. They are all in the same window and i can hide them without having to close and reopen a whole bunch of applications.

There are terminal alternatives for many of the GUI options (not different font sizes or images or doom) but plenty of the other options are covered, if you are jumping on a server remotely, you can do that using emacs built-in tramp so that you can use your configured editor.

I had a professor in college that lost a hand in a logging accident. He's an avid emacs evangelist for the sole reason he can still write code fast one handed.

The ultimate editor: cat + sed + semantic parsing programs + U*NIX pipelines That or you could just use TempleOS' text editor

I'm a happy vim user, and got into neovim because of you Prime. What got me into neovim & plugins is watching how fast you could move around doing stuff. I've been using vim for a couple of decades, but stupidly never really got past the basic vim motions, and never did any real customization or plugins. I got into vscode, and installed vim motions, and was happy, but the constant having to grab the mouse for things was getting in the way of my flow state. I realized that I don't need the fancy graphics, windows or other nonsense. When I am deep in "code brain", I'm just thinking in text anyway, so watching you use the plugins and how fast you could do stuff that I could do in vs code but a lot slower got me to try the neovim way, and this is now where I live. So I would say to programmers that when considering another editor, watch an experienced user do their thing in that editor, and if it looks faster/more powerful/more enjoyable than yours, then consider switching. I have no need to switch from neovim now. Maybe something will appear in the future, but I honestly see using vim motions until I die.

Emacs users rise up!

I'm an Emacs User but I understand the appeal of Vim. There is no question that Elisp is a better language than Vimscript, but with Neovim's switch to Lua, I think that argument is no longer cut and dry. Vim is definitely still snappier than Emacs, but Emacs is still lightning fast compared to today's software. And with Elisp being compiled in version 28.0 of Emacs it's even faster now. And if you run Emacs as a daemon it launches just as fast as Vim. With that being said, I really do think that Emacs is a lot more than just a text editor and using it as such is really underutilizing it. And if all's you need is to edit code it can be a bit overwhelming. But there is a certain magic to that kitchen sink mentality that it has that leads to videos like this ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FtieBc3KptU.html (Emacs for Writers) which is a Writer talking about their journey to discovering Emacs for their writing process.

Emacs 4 life If I need a lightweight, portable editing experience, I use ed 🗿

Gandalf was just shitposting on 4chan in that image, a true wizard

I love Emacs, but it absolutely SUCKS in Window$, nvim behaves miles better in Window$.

Helix is nice because it is very good out of the box (treesitter based commands are amazing) and runs in the command line, so it is very easy to add to a dev container or to run in any environment that you want to to access. The downside of it is that kakoune-style keybinds will mess with your vim muscle memory

I just came off of trying Neovim for a month. I like it but I’ve gone back to VScode simply for the Typescript error translator extension (I’m still learning Typescript) but I am using the VIM mode for VS Code now. I still use Neovim when writing Python or Rust.

When you were searching for the meme I kept thinking about "Silly Hats Only" but I'm glad you found the right one

Some Helix keybindings are absolutely weird and inefficient, the lack of plugins is a dealbreaker for now, but I kind of dig the whole Selection -> Command thing.

then there's me using and liking both. It does take a few minutes for the muscle memory to kick-in when switching

I built muscle memory for Emacs keybindings, and love that a bunch of them work in Bash too. I rage quit vimtutor once however.

Vim is just a "graphical" layer on top of ed(1). You should go for that. Emacs used the modern use way to use the Ctrl key and ESC key. While vi(1) (and vim etc) are just change between states that you have to remember. You should look at willy(1). That is actually expanding with whatever language you want to code in.

Richard Stallman actually uses Emacs in the TTY, and he only opens a graphical environment when he wants to use something graphical-only.

the Bill Burr energy is great lol Never heard of vim or emacs until yesterday (actually I had when having to edit some system file a bit ago and didn't knew how to leave - yes, true story), and realized vim does with one keystroke what I've been using the most effed up keyboard shortcuts only I seem to know computers do (like shift insert or ctrl arrow) with freaking sublime text (because dark mode in notepad++ is a nightmare) And there's a little dip in performance whenever you first adopt anything that'll give you a increase in performance. It's normal and expected. There's a curve.

I use Witchemacs because it has nice defaults, no layers and Marisa from Touhou in the splash screen.

Also, going purely by speed, when do we get to see Prime try to learn how to use Plover (open source stenography software) to write code? Yes this is real and yes people do use it to type code at 300wpm. This is only a half-joke. If I were young and less set in my ways, the ergonomics and substantially reduced hand motion adds so much physical longevity over typing with a keyboard that that I'd invest the time to learn it. Having at least double the typing speed for the rest of my life would be a nice side benefit.

11:44 screw you, I like Helix.

Church of Emacs or Cult of Vim

If you move desks, ESPECIALLY if you move sites day by day, and ESPECIALLY ESPECIALLY if you need to visit sites that do not let you put any of your media near their machines or pull your files across the internet, then you can't have your emacs config with you. When you are called in to a site and you have half a day to get a job done ... are you going to use a vanilla emacs where all your muscle memory for your personalized emacs setup is not with you? Nope. So it's vi. Now, if you are stuck in a corner on the same physical keyboard, with the same $HOME, and you are going to stay there forever, then fiiiiiiiiiiine, go emacs to your hearts content - have some alt-control-meta-bucky-f5-shift-C macro that microwaves your pizza and walks your dog.

Why did you switch from Doom Emacs back to Vim? I just started using it about a week ago and I’m really liking Magit and org mode. What’s better about Neovim that made you switch back? For me, Vim was all about its keybindings and Doom Emacs has that so I don’t know what I’m missing.

I have seen 1 emacs user in my life. He was presenting at a Rust talk. He recompiled the Linux kernel on stage too. This is not a joke.

Indeed it's love a flame war. Just use emacs.

Once upon a time, I was big into the whole Vim supremacy thing (having tried both it and Emacs). But then I installed Plan 9, learned structural regular expressions and mouse chording, and fell in love with Acme. Sadly, none of those discoveries and innovations made it into any modern-day editor. Vis is a terminal-based clone of Sam, but it doesn't have LSP support and all the rest of the things you'd need. VS Code, customizable though it may be, doesn't have hooks to support this stuff either. But I can speak from experience and say that a mouse can speed things up *if* the mouse commands are designed as thoroughly and thoughtfully as the Vim motions. Someone someday will probably rediscover Acme and make a cool modern thing inspired by it. Until then, I mostly use whatever the most popular set of tools are for the ecosystem I'm working in. But I'm holding out hope that Kakuone or Helix will get to the point where it'll be worth changing my muscle memory away from Vim bindings.

That Nautro meme makes me really wanna pick up VIM again

And micro enters the chat

evilmode in spacemacs/doomemacs - war is over

I honestly just use vim cause I have more fun coding with it and can take the hand off the keyboard less often. I don't think it increases my productivity that much

you can embed opengl output in emacs, that is how you get Doom running in it.

That kakashi meme is too funny. Prime is too old yo get it.

6:43 The emacs pinky meme hurts me on a ideological level. You're in a highly configurable editor and for YEARS somehow people didn't think to change their key binds to exclude key chords or rebind their keys so that ctrl was something more ergonomic like caps lock(who uses caps lock anyway?).

I just realized that vim was that damn text editor that I had to turn the computer off to exit when I first tried to run linux.

It's called Doom Emacs because you're Doomed to keep getting the wrong answers when asking for help with your hipster variant.

I cannot edit source code without vim like bindings or plugins anymore. In the nineties Emacs at my university was known as Eating Megabytes And Constantly Swapping 🤣

Paragraph jump is one ‘{‘, not two. It actually jumps to the next blank line.

The joke should be: Emacs is like a complete operating system but... it's just missing a kernel... Sorry Richard :(

I switched to vim motions about 5 days ago and it's so damn fun. Even now it just feels faster. thanks prime!

also a question @ThePrimeTime, for someone learning the web do you recommend learning things as if it's in the 00's and like trying to figure out each layer from application to network and what's happening under the hood

The old vi v emacs wars .... I was there Gandalf ... when we'd say emacs was a self-referential acronym for "emacs makes all computers slow" because it was "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". (back when 16 megabytes ram was a machine a small dev team would drool over). I felt perfectly ok slagging off emacs as I was an emacs user before meeting vi. There were actually commercial systems that came with emacs as the only editor (apart from line editors). Now, let's see how you folk go trying to use ed (or even ex, even ex with a decent .exinit file) for a couple of hours. If you know vi, you know ex ... kinda.

It's not just emacs users who customize their config file 10 times a day, that ritual is also performed by vim users. It starts with "who needs an IDE? I'll just use Vim", followed by "I'll just add a plugin to do X, Y, Z", followed by "my config file is 20k lines long", and in the end you have ... an IDE, but worse, because the plugins don't match the quality of a professional IDE. But at least you can hjkl or something.

how ide users debug their code: breakpoints, debug window, variable window, step over/into/out, pause/resume/restart how vim users debug their code: grep

I can literally run two different instances of neovim with two different terminal emulators inside my emacs. I can even run emacs inside emacs and in that emacs change my config values so I can lanch an instance of TUI-emacs. Why would anyone want something simple and elegant instead of spending their days configuring emacs?

3:45 devaslife...? who is it

prime : you guys know what i mean vladeimir : guy beating meat

"terminal emacs users" haha

This video will definetly go *vi* ral, it will get th *e max* imum number of views that youtube allows (which is 301).

I have edited borked configs on half dead systems with just cat and sed. Because the alternative would have been vi(m).

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

Any editor that does not require a mouse is fine for me. That said, I hate browsers. Vimium make it less painfull, tho.

The age old battle is VI (pronounced vee eye) vs Emacs. If you have to resort to vim or neovim in the battle you've already lost.

What are you optimizing for? LISP is superior in syntax. Why else did Vim need an entire re-write? Vim prevails because of simple-minded reasons: it's a common default editor, the mistaken belief that h, j, k, l were designed for ergonomics, the idea that users should conform to an editor rather than configure it to the user's needs, etc. Just use -q to make a quick one-off edit, use a vim-mode if you want or god-mode. Emacs is more capable and that isn't a bad thing. Magit and org-mode should be reason enough.

1:10 The person who comment J-ASS, lmao.

Veni,vidi,ViM. Salutations from France.

I learned python using terminal emacs while ssh’d into a university computer, in 2018…

The 'other side’s inconveniences/difficulties/bad design' cited by the opposing factions in these 'wars' are as convincing as those black&white 'before' segments in infomercials. Learn the proper *idiomatic* usage patterns for your editor, and you'll discover why those patterns have persisted ~40 years in their respective families. There's always room for improvement, of course; but no one's going to find a GOTCHA! moment that will settle once and for all, that one editor's design is inferior to the other's. (& it's all the more ridiculous when beginners claim to find those 'gotcha's.)

I can't believe people keep saying it's vim vs emacs, no, it's vi vs emacs. sheesh!

4:13 "redrawtime exceeded, syntax highlighting disabled"

Almost 16 minutes of "You know what I mean?".

Always funny that people think emacs doesn't fit the unix philosophy when it does perfectly. it's simply an elisp interpreter, all the "editor" and "Operating System" that has cropped up around it are merely incidental.

good take, people with hyperactivity feel great using vim speed, but they make so many mistakes do to the speed that they waste more time fixing all the mistakes because of it.

So I just started using vim like 2 weeks ago. One, I haven't felt like I was stumbling around since like day 3 or so, and two, WHERE HAS THAT CREAT SHEET AT 4:43 BEEN ALL THIS TIME I COULD'VE REALLY USED THAT SHIT.

I do use terminal in nvim :20 hsplit :terminal :)

Just use nano lol

Epic battle, greater than Avengers vs Thanos

If working with a company I rather use vim , if for my own projects either one is fine with me. I like terminal based tools and if I wanted to do other things then emacs would be put into consideration.

In terms of productivity and editing speed, which is faster, Vim or Emacs？

I..... I use Notepad++.

I like both, but my fav and DD is emacs in a shell. I prefer not to acknowledge Stallman has anything to do with the editor, though. XD. Emacs has gotten so much better with good, fast plugins, native compilation, etc. It used to be SO SLOW to start up. Now it's so close to vim it doesn't matter. Why do SO MANY vim users not know how to use it? And out of the box it's painfully inefficient working with more than 1 file. Seems like most people use it because they think they're getting nerd status. And sometimes I find its modal nature awkward. It works out sometimes, but feels slower in other circumstances.

Just a question out of curiosity. Why not to use terminal emulators inside ide?

it is real when gandalf read the hp script. because director didnt print it.

I miss QEdit with the WordStar bindings.

A little known fact... James Gosling is the author of Emacs. Richard Stallman basically yoinked his code and re-licensed it to GPL (though old copyright was lingering in some files at first), and then started actually working with it. I believe that at this point there is none of the original code there, but calling Richard Stallman the author of GNU Emacs even, seems like a bit of stretch to me, as GNU Emacs was only possible to start existing, because Gosling had let this one slide, as this was basically stealing his code and breaking the terms of original license, and he just didn't want to deal with it and wasn't working on Emacs anymore.

I've been using Emacs for almost as long as I've been a programmer, but in the past year I've made a concerted effort to learn modal editing with Vim and I now understand the reason for the Vim evangelism expressed here and elsewhere. While I still prefer Emacs overall (I cannot give up on Org mode, Info mode, and my beloved Elisp) I am now using Evil as my daily driver and really do feel like I have the best of both worlds. Also, with respect to terminal emulators in the editor environment -- Emacs terminal emulation using `vterm` is decent bit but I still prefer using tmux with Emacs-nox for more complicated, terminal centric dev work flows. I do have a soft-spot for eshell, though :)

For people saying emacs is a good os only missing a good text editor . Never have they used emacs . You configure for editor to suit ur need not the other way around

The Gandalf image is as old as at least 2014

i dont understand shit but css and html but im having fun here

15:24 Tears of the Wantagen

(require 'evil) (evil-mode 1) (setq evil-ex-search-case 'sensitive)

I like vim because I live in the shell

I prefer Nano!

You couldnt tell the voice is generated? oh no

I live in Vim, I have Doom Emacs (with native compilation) installed. I just like the speed of vim. Sometimes I jump into emacs to work on things. Some plugins are fun.

tbh I'm kind of tired of people insanely exagurating the difficulty of vim it's not hard. It took me 30 minutes to be ok at it. And after a month you already might be faster than your previous speed what will take a month of too is editor customisation, but if you just start with vim motions you can still use vsc and get the speed benefits.

When the reaction is 3 times the length of the video

Meanwhile I’m sitting here chilling with my helix 🧬

Exploration vs. Exploitation

Vim doesn't have magit and org mode, so, this means Emacs is my editor of choice.

Since you can have terminal inside Emacs, why not combine the best OS with the best editor ? With evil mode so that you only have one set of keybinds.

Evil Mode.

Emacs is the only editor you need if you use editor daily . If it one off edit then vim is okay

you can't advocate for a super-keyboard while complaining about emacs finger mashing. i don't have a super-keyboard, but i do pick my keyboards where i can hit the control key with the palm of my hands. pretty much erases the emacs finger strain.

I learned rust and neovim by working through the zero2prod book. I typed out every code snippet and by the fifth chapter I was moving in neovim faster than vscode. zero2prod was particularly good for exercising vim motions because throughout the book you revisit the same code snippets several times as you enhance and optimise the code base.

"that guy had a good voice" It is an AI generated video