Chris Frost writes:
Chris> What are people's reasons for using [x]emacs over vim or vim over
Chris> [x]emacs? I currently am using vim, and love it, but would like to hear
Chris> from both sides.
It is a different philosophy. I think that using vi is suitable, for
instance, for sysadmins. Those guys usually want to quickly edit one or two
lines in a file, and do it many times for different files. They don't want the
assle of waiting 10 or 20 seconds for Emacs[1] to startup. Vi is good for
quick and short editing, when you don't have an Emacs session running, or when
you're not under X11 (although Emacs can run on ttys).
On the contrary, Emacs is more suitable for developement purposes, and
actually for many other things. Personally, I practically *live* in my XEmacs
session. Really, I almost don't use any terminal. Not only I develop under it,
but I read mail and news in XEmacs, I browse the web in XEmacs, I ftp in
XEmacs, I telnet in XEmacs, I shell in XEmacs, I read man pages and info nodes
in XEmacs, I compile in XEmacs, I debug in XEmacs ...
If one doesn't necessarily want to turn his Emacs into a real
operating system ;-), the major functionnality of it is its incredible editing
power. After some learning, you find a edition mode for amost any kinds of
files (programming langages, ChangeLogs, resources files ...) with keyboard
shortcuts, syntax highlighting, colors, and all things that could make your
life easier and less to type.
Footnotes:
[1] I use `Emacs' as a generic term for all flavors
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