What is the difference between vim and emacs

You can even download a GUI version of VIM, such as gVim, to add menus and toolbars for commonly used commands, making the editor even easier to learn. Emacs is sort of like a sandbox game. While there are cheatsheets and tutorials online, but you can spend hours with them, and you will barely scratch the surface of what Emacs can do.

Vim is a fast text editor that opens instantly and presents its users with two modes: insert mode and command mode. The former is where you type text into the editor, while the latter is where you enter keyboard shortcuts to execute various commands. Instead, they open Emacs in shell mode, allowing them to run shell in Emacs, instead of the other way around. But if you manage to stay focus and use Emacs to improve your workflow, your productivity can skyrocket.

Podcast: Play in new window Download. Share via. Copy Link. Powered by Social Snap. Copy link. There is a long history of competition between these two text editors, which are vastly more advanced than other text editors on the Unix platform. While both editors feature similar functionality through their plugins, scripting, and shortcut keys, their approaches are slightly different. 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. 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. 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.

Both are really good and highly-efficient text editors used by most seasoned Linux users and programmers alike. Vim is an augmented version of the vi text editor used on Unix systems. Short for visual editor, vi is the standard text editor found in almost every Unix system and it is the most popular Linux text editor.

It has been around since the early days of Unix. Vim is a vi-like screen-oriented text editor built to enable efficient text editing. The first version of Vim was released to the public by Bram Moolenaar in It has evolved into one of the most popular and feature-rich editors since then. In , the fifth generation of Vim was released and with it one of the most used features of the editor, Scripting, was also introduced.

People can now write their own scripts for Vim, eventually expanding its functionality. Most users say Emacs is not actually an editor; in fact, it is a highly extensible LISP List Processor system that features text editing. It is one of the most popular text editors in Linux which also acts as an electronic mail client, an integrated development environment, a document browser, etc.

In insert mode, your keystrokes become part of the document. Visual mode is used to make selection of text. You can create and edit your documents by switching back and forth between these modes. Emacs is also a display editor but it is much more than just a text editor.

It also acts as an electronic mail client, an integrated development environment, a document browser, etc. It is better than most text editors out there. However, it does not come preinstalled and a very few Linux distributions ship with Emacs out-of-the-box.