Differences between Emacs and Vim

Question

Without getting into a religious argument about why one is better than the other  what are the practical differences between Emacs and Vim  I m looking to learn one or the other  but I realize the learning curve for each is high and I can t decide  I have never used an editor of this type  I ve always used IDEs   so anything that helps a newbie is a plus     Before a flame war starts  I m not asking which is better  I m asking the differences between the two  I would like an objective comparison

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Keystroke execution    vi editing retains each permutation of typed keys  This creates a path in the decision tree which unambiguously identifies any command   whereas Emacs commands are a combination of typed keys executed immediately  which leaves the user with the choice of whether or not to use a command   Memory usage and customizability    vi is a smaller and faster program  with a more limited capacity for customization  whereas  Emacs takes longer to start up and requires more memory  However  it is highly customizable and includes a large number of features  as it is essentially an execution environment for a Lisp program designed for text-editing

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If you move around a lot from site to site or your job involves loging on to production systems then vim is the way to go   All  nix machines will have vi installed by default   Most sysdamins prefer ksh as the default shell  ksh uses vi  or emacs  command keystrokes to search history and edit the command line   If you dont know vi well you are severely handicapped when you log into a unix box with a standard configuraton   For this reason alone I would recommend vim as your normal every day editor  I have seen emacs fans tear there hair out trying to amend config files on a bare bones unix server

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I think the main difference is the design target  VIM is for UNIX as a working editor  Emacs is for GNU and lisp hackers  so it has some mixed design element   I use vim on my workstation  while I love emacs too

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Firstly Vi  original realization  not used today  That you say is some Vim derivation   To extend Vim functionality you must recompile Vim  Emacs not   Emacs has Vim in self  viper-mode    Emacs usually need manually installation  Vim typically preinstalled on all Unix like OS  but if you have ssh access to host tramp-mode win Vim      If you try Vim you hate Emacs  so start from Emacs first   Also read http   www dina dk  abraham religion vi-tutorial html  link go down so use this   Anwer search in hxxp   en wikipedia org wiki Editor war

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Vim is not a shell  And it does not communicate well with subprocesses  This is nearly by design  whereas in Emacs  these elements are included by design  This means that some stuff  like embedding a debugger or an interpreter  yielding a sort of IDE   is difficult in Vim   Also  Emacs shortcuts are mainly accessed through modifiers  and obviously the Vim interface is famously modal  giving access to an absurd amount of direct keys for manipulation   Emacs used to be the only editor of the two that was programmable  and while Vim has a lot of weird levels to its programmability  with the addition of Python and Ruby bindings  and more  I forget   Vim is also programmable in most ways you d care for   I use Vim  and I m fairly happy with it

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If you are looking for an objective analysis of both the editors  look at their origins and the philosophy behind their respective designs  Think  which one would suit you better and learn it  and learn it and learn it  because it takes time before you being to discover its true utility as against any IDE   An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi was written by Bill Joy and Mark Horton and he explains why he choose modal design and rationale for various key strokes   it helps me to remember that CTRL-W  W  will switch to next Window and it will same for CTRL W  CTRL W  just in case you held the CTRL key for a longer duration   Here is a link to Emacs timeline and has the reference to Multics Emacs paper  Hereis RMS paper on Emacs  where I see the stress is on a programmable text editor  even way back in 1981 and before       I have not read the emacs papers  but have read Bill Joy s vi paper a couple of times  Both are old  but still you will get the philosophy and you might choose to use the current tool  vim 7 x or emacs 25      Edit  I forgot to mention that it takes patience and imagination to read both these papers as it takes you back in time while reading it  But it is worth

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VI is always available and will run on the most crippled  single user mode  broken graphics  no keymap  slow link machine - so it s worth knowing how to edit simple files in it just for sysadmin tasks   Emacs is a complete user interface in an editor  The idea is that you fire up Emacs when you start the machine and never leave it  It s possible to have thousands of sessions present   Whether learning the capabilities of Emacs are worth it compared to using a GUI editor IDE and using something like python awk etc for extra tasks is up to you

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Vim      better as a simple editor  fewer keys required for simple tasks  more active scripting community - internal language  vimscript   one central repository of scripts  plugins  color schemes        also extensible in python  ruby   can be made portable  emacs has some problems with that    Emacs      non modal by default  most of today s editors have taken this approach   Though there is evil-mode which emulates vim behavior  more powerful language for extending it  elisp is a full blown language  and in emacs you can practically redefine everything  while in vim you cannot redefine build in functions of the editor  On the downside  vimscript is relatively similar to today s dynamic languages while elisp doesn t resemble pretty much anything    more extendible   excellent support for GNU tools  the bunch of them    Personally  I prefer vim - it is small  does what it s supposed to do  and when I wish a full blown IDE I open VS  Emacs s approach of being an editor which wants to be an IDE  or should I say  an OS   but is not quite  is IMHO  outdated  In the old days having a email client  ftp client  tetris      whatnot in one package  emacs  made some sense     nowadays  it doesn t anymore   Both are however a topic of religious discussions among the programmer and superuser community users  and in that respect  both are excellent for starting flame wars if put in contact  in the same sentence   question

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I am an Emacs fan but encourage other developers to learn VI because     you can use VI to edit the emacs makefiles  VI includes ed commands and every UNIX user should know ed and sed    I ve noticed several comments about VIM starting faster than emacs  If you really care about that  run emacs in server mode and alias  emacs  to  emacsclient   The client is super fast since all it does is tap the server on the shoulder and tell it which file you want to edit  On MacOSX  emacsclient is only 33K while emacs is 287M   I m not sure any of this is necessary on modern hardware  On my MacBook Pro  2013 Retina   emacs loads almost instantaneously when I run it from the shell  I detect no pause at all  When I run Emacs app  the GUI version  it might take all of 3 seconds   Most complaints I hear about emacs seem to come from people misinformed about emacs  Having used both vi and emacs since 1982  I definitely remember a time when emacs loaded much slower than vi and used most of the physical memory in my early UNIX boxes  but that is no longer the case and has not been for at least 15-20 years   One complaint I will concede is  emacs pinkie   This never bothered me at all when I was younger  Now that I m 58  my pinkie does get a bit sore from repeatedly accessing the Control key for emacs chording  This is especially true on the MacBook Pro keyboard where Control is moved one position to the right to make room for the  fn  key  It s not nearly as annoying when Control is the bottom left key

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The biggest difference for me in choosing to use emacs over vim was the built in gdb support in emacs   Vim doesn t have this included in it s default distribution and the project there for integrating gdb and vim was nearly impossible to get working with MacVim

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I started with vi  went to emacs  then to vim   I ve been thinking of trying out Emacs to see what s changed in the last five years    Speaking of IDE s  I had gotten into eclipse for a while  but I prefer my terminal window connecting my mac to my  husband s  linux box      The cut and paste thing has been bothering me lately   Cut and paste in Vim takes more steps than in Emacs  IIRC   And pasting from say a browser to a terminal window is irritating unless you do something fancy that I don t feel like doing  so I put up with the weird indentation   I think  editing multiple files in emacs was easier   At least jumping from one file to the next if you have them both up on the screen     I haven t played with the fancy features of either vi or emacs  as I just like to get to the business of coding   All I need is the pretty colors and proper tab to space conversion  especially important with python      I think it all depends on if you want to use  wq or Ctrl-x Ctrl-s  IIRC  to save a file if you don t care about the fancy stuff    mgb was correct   I ve been in the bare minimum linux to fix something just a month or two ago in a Debian distro   vi was the only editor available

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vim is a handy editor  you simple type vim filename to open the file  edit  save and close   emacs is an  operating system  pretend to be an editor  you can eval code to change its behavior  and extend it as you like  A mode to receive send email on emacs is like an email software on operating system   When doing simple editing  for example  modify a config file  I use vim   Otherwise  I never leave emacs

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Benefits of Emacs   Emacs has both non-modal interface  by default  and modal one  e g  it can emulate vim and vi through Evil  Viper  or Vimpulse   One of the most ported computer programs  It runs in text mode and under graphical user interfaces on a wide variety of operating systems  including most Unix-like systems  Linux  the various BSDs  Solaris  AIX  IRIX  macOSetc    MS-DOS  Microsoft Windows  AmigaOS  and OpenVMS  Unix systems  both free and proprietary  frequently provide Emacs bundled with the operating system  Emacs server architecture allows multiple clients to attach to the same Emacs instance and share the buffer list  kill ring  undo history and other state  Pervasive online help system with keybindings  functions and commands documented on the fly  Extensible and customizable Lisp programming language variant  Emacs Lisp   with features that include  A powerful and extensible file manager  dired   integrated debugger  and a large set of development and other tools  Having every command be an Emacs Lisp function enables commands to DWIM  Do What I Mean  by programmatically responding to past actions and document state  For example  a switch-or-split-window command could switch to another window if one exists  or create one if needed  This cuts down on the number of keystrokes and commands a user must remember   An OS inside an OS   Emacs Lisp enables Emacs to be programmed far beyond editing features  Even a base install contains several dozen applications  including two web browsers  news readers  several mail agents  four IRC clients  a version of ELIZA  and a variety of games  All of these applications are available anywhere Emacs runs  with the same user interface and functionality  Starting with version 24  Emacs includes a package manager  making it easy to install additional applications including alternate web browsers  EMMS  Emacs Multimedia System   and more  Also available are numerous packages for programming  including some targeted at specific language library combinations or coding styles    Benefits of vi-like editors   Edit commands are composable Vi has a modal interface  which Emacs can emulate  Historically  vi loads faster than Emacs  While deeply associated with UNIX tradition  it runs on all systems that can implement the standard C library  including UNIX  Linux  AmigaOS  DOS  Windows  Mac  BeOS  OpenVMS  IRIX  AIX  HP-UX  BSD and POSIX-compliant systems  Extensible and customizable through Vim script or APIs for interpreted languages such as Python  Ruby  Perl  and Lua Ubiquitous  Essentially all Unix and Unix-like systems come with vi  or a variant  built-in  Vi  and ex  but not vim  is specified in the POSIX standard  System rescue environments  embedded systems  notably those with busybox  and other constrained environments often include vi  but not emacs    Source  https   en wikipedia org wiki Editor war

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Now you do not even need to think about the difference between these two because of Spacemacs  It is a community-driven Emacs distribution   As it said      The best editor is neither Emacs nor vim  It s Emacs and Vim    Spacemacs combines the best from both Emacs and Vim  which make your life and job much easier   See screenshot below     source  spacemacs org

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Vim was always faster to start up than Emacs  I m saying that on any machine  out-of-the-box installs of Vim will start up faster than out-of-the-box installs of Emacs  And I tend to think that after a moderate amount of customisation of either one  Vim will still start up faster than Emacs  After that  the other practical difference was Emacs  modes  They make your life tremendously easier when editing XML  C C   Java whatever  LaTeX  and most popular languages you can think of  They make you want to keep the editor open for long sessions and work    All in all  I ll say that Vim pulls you to it for short  fast editing tasks  while Emacs encourages you to dive in for long sessions

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There is a lot of thing that have been said about both editors  but I just have my 5 pence to add  Both editors are wonderful and you cannot go wrong with either of them   I am a vi vim user for about 15 years now  I ve tried converting to emacs several times but every time was rather discovering that vim actually can do the missing thing out of the box without the need to write a lisp extension or install something   For me the main difference in the editors that vim makes you use the environment OS  while emacs tries to encapsulate it or replace it  For instance you can add a date in you text by  r date in vim  or calendar with  r cal 1 2014  or even replace the contents of you buffer with the hex version of the contents  Eg     xxd  edit hex and then get back with    xxd -r  and many more other uses  like builtin grep  sed  etc   Another example is use with jq and gron  Eg  paste json blob to the editor and then run for tranformation    r curl -s http   interesting api v1 get stuff    gron   grep  interesting    gron -u   OR     jq  path to stuff   Each of the piped commands above can be run separately via     lt command gt   where   means all document  but can also be run on selection  selected lines  etc  Here gron output can be used as jq path   You also get the EX batch editing functionality  eg  Replacing certain words  reformatting the code  converting dos- unix newline characters  run a macro on say 100 files at a time  It is easily done with ex  I am not sure if emacs has something similar   In other words IMHO vim goes closer to the unix philosophy  It generally simpler and smaller  but if you know your OS and your tools  you wont likely need more than it VIM  has to offer  I never do   Besides vi is defacto standard on any unix linux system  why learn to use 2 tools that do the same thing  Of course some systems offer mg or something similar  but definitely not all of them  Unix   Vi  lt  3   Well  just my 5 pence

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Emacs is really more of a do everything program  and vi m  is really just an editor  If you are editing text  they are both fine  but I prefer emacs  simply because I have to shift one off the home row to move around  and keep typing the wrong things in command mode  I you don t have that problem  vi m  may be the editor for you

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There is a huge difference on a day-to-day level - Vim  or any vi variant  is inherently modal  you go into command modes where you cannot edit  and Emacs  along with most other editors  are not   Sure  using menus and such you don t have to actually enter command mode in Vim - at first   But to use even a tiny fraction of the power of Vim you will   That is at the heart of the Vim Emacs debate   Personally  I also think Emacs is far more extensible   You can find Elisp packages for many things   I am curious  though  why you are thinking to learn one of these over a more traditional IDE   What is it you want to learn one of these for

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the text below is my opinion  it should not be taken as fact or an insult   With Emacs you are expected to have it open 24 7 and live inside the program  almost everything you do can be done from there  You write your own extensions  use it for note-taking  organization  games  programming  shell access  file access  listening to music  web browsing  It takes weeks and weeks till you will be happy with it and then you will learn new stuff all the time  You will be annoyed when you don t have access to it and constantly change your config  You won t be able to use other peoples emacs versions easily and it won t just be installed  It uses Lisp  which is great  You can make it into anything you want it to be   anything  at all   With Vim  it s almost always pre-installed  It s fast  You open up a file do a quick edit and then quit  You can work with the basic setup if you are on someone else s machine  It s not quite so editable  but it s still far better than most text editors  It recognizes that most of the time you are reading editing not typing and makes that portion faster  You don t suffer from emacs pinkie  It s not so infuriating  It s easier to learn    Even though I use Emacs all day every day  and love it  unless you intend to spend a lot of time in the program you choose I would pick vim

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In your question  you haven t mentioned that you want it to program in Lisp  But as you have been commenting your answers  I have understood that you actually want a LISP programming interface   For that precise task  simply forget about Vi  Emacs integration with LISP is wonderful  You should use SLIME  You will then have wonderful integration with the REPL  being able to eval functions  buffers or files directly into a running interpreter in an emacs buffer and much more

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I have worked with spacemacs for about 2 years and neovim for about a year now in a production research environment  Spacemacs is emacs with couple of nice extra features like layers etc  And neovim is a fork of vim again with some extra features    I am quite unsatisfied with both of them in terms of experience  And I am still on the look out for a long term solution for my text editing needs   Here is a simple comparison    Neovim  vim  emacs  spacemacs  etc all of those editors consume less ressources compared to most of the editors out there  Neovim vim is slightly faster than emacs  noticably faster than spacemacs  In terms of editing experience  I can easily say that emacs packages feel superior  I think that s because they blend in better with the core of emacs   Vimscript is nice and there are certainly great projects in the vim ecosystem as well  The good thing is they are better documented than most emacs projects I have seen so far  Both can be glitchy depending on the package you are using  Spacemacs tend to freeze  and neovim tend to display scary error messages  so pick your poison there  Modal editing in vim  is not an intuitive concept  but once you get used to it  you want it anywere  Both of the editor provide that

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Emacs has viper-mode  so in some real sense  it provides a superset of features  excepting those described in What Vim features are missing in Emacs with Viper and Vimpulse     vi  and VIM IIRC  is lighter weight  it can edit files in place   but offers fewer features  subprocess communication  extension language

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For me pros of emacs are    tramp-mode allows you to edit remote files over ssh  just like local files  tramp-mode   dired   full featured sftp client support for every language you will ever need  built in terminal emulator term-mode  so i can keep coding without switching between applications  extensibility anything you don t like you can change using lisp

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I would like to put here a quote from the book  The Art of UNIX Programming       Many people who regularly use both vi and Emacs tend to use them for   different things  and find it valuable to know both       In general  vi is best for small jobs     quick replies to mail  simple   tweaks to system configuration  and the like  It is especially useful   when you   re using a new system  or a remote one over a network  and   don   t have your Emacs customization files handy       Emacs comes into its own for extended editing sessions in which you   have to handle complex tasks  modify multiple files  and use results   from other programs during the session  For programmers using X on   their console  which is typical on modern Unixes   it   s normal to   start up Emacs shortly after login time in a large window and leave it   running forever  possibly visiting dozens of files and even running   programs in multiple Emacs subwindows    What I really want to highlight here is the    Many people find it valuable to know both

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I m a full-blown Emacs fan-boy  but I knew VI long before I knew Emacs   That said  I make all of my people learn VI because it s always available  everywhere   Can t go wrong with either one of them

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Its like apples and oranges  Both have different design and philosphy  Vim is a Text Editor while Emacs is a Lisp Interpreter that does Text Editing     I use Vim because its fast  sleak  and really good at manipulating texts  It has a composable natural key binding that can make your development tasks really harmonic  Vim is based on the simple  nix philiosphy of doing one thing really well - i e Text Manipulation   Extending Vim using bash zsh and tmux is usually easy and allows you learn a lot of things  IMHO this is a good learning curve  The key thing is to learn how to integrate these things to get a larger working application  With Vim you ll need to learn integration because it doesn t naturally integrate unless you tell it how to  Another worthwhile extension which I use is Tig   Its an ncurses based Git frontend   I just have a binding that opens Tig silently and then I do all the Git stuff there   Its up to the end user to decide what works best  That Emacs and Vim has stood the test of time is proof of their worthiness  Eventually a good programmer needs nothing more than a pen and a paper to be creative  Good algorithms don t need editors to back them  So try them both and see what makes you more productive  And learn design patterns from both these softwares as there are plenty to learn and discover

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Seems an answer has been selected already  but the big difference to me has always been the modal vs  non-modal  Vim is modal  which means that it makes optimizations based on a specific set of usage modes  At least that s how I ve always looked at it  This makes using Vim a different experience because instead of having a work area that you type code in  you really are telling an environment to act on the text  This is why people say things like with Vim you really are learning a language  The  wq and  s foo bar is all part of a shell like environment that edits and reads text    Emacs on the other hand is much closer to most editors word processors etc  you see today  You have a workspace that has a highly programmable interface  That is why you see things like email  irc  shells  etc  As a programmer it is easy to think in terms of saying  take the line number I m on and do something with the information   The desire to leave the editor becomes less because instead of having to quit  open some other app language and do things on some text  you have Emacs where you can do these things within the scope of your editor    The two ideas are not necessarily contrasting  but it is simply that they reveal two different focuses  Personally I use Emacs  but I ve seen folks who know Vim really well and can honestly say it doesn t matter which you choose  I tried Vim first but Emacs ended up sticking for me  It is true that no matter what you choose  you should be at least somewhat proficient in Vim as it really is always available

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A jaundiced point of view   vi  not vim  is a professional necessity   You always have some form of vi easily available  no matter what the environment   You can be in vi when in emacs  you can be in vi to build bash commands in unix-land   Even Microsquish has to support vi  although they do a good job of hiding it  because of gov t and corporate compliance with published  standards   In my opinion  if you are in a hands-on job in a busy environment--not a hothouse flower confined to one fancy rig in a development environment  or in academia--knowing a lot about a fancy editor is a job  handicap   Don t learn all the fancy tricks in vim or emacs  and don t  develop a bunch of macros to make the editing environment bend to your will  It s an enormous time sink that gets in your way when you attend to  different machines that you probably can t justify in a factory environment   Read Bill Joy s paper--it is a very competent  perhaps even beautiful  engineering exercise in editing plain text very  very fast   Parito s rule applies here  80  of the fruit is in 20  of the baskets   Editing plain text very very fast is the crux of editing competence--all else is optional--and sometimes hurtful

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I was user of vim first  then I switched to emacs  then to vim  now I m experimenting with emacs again    Both are great editors  Both are very extensible today Both have great plugins and community   As developers we type a lot  and  at last for me  moving around in buffers and files are the biggest repetitive tasks  so I want a editor where I CAN MOVE FAST   The motivation for experimenting with emacs again is that I fell it Ctrl leaded keybinds faster than vim  and easier to reason about   In vim you have modes  you have insertion mode  visual mode  normal mode  what happens when you press something depends on the mode that you are  is a stateful aproach to editing  You move  enter in insert mode  edit  get out of insert mode and move again  I frequently lose my self if I miss a ESC press or something like this   In emacs there is no mode  basically you press Ctrl with your pink and type the keystroke  like C-x C-f  C-x C-s  C-x C-c  There are keybinds where you need to release ctrl key  I hate this ones and always replace them by ones with control pressed   I think that emacs approach is faster to think and type  but vim has another strength  to  Its commands are composable  they usually has a format   For example  to delete a line you can use dd  to delete a word dw  Plugins make use of that felling  with vim-surround plugin you can delete quotes with ds   delete surround     delete up to next   dt   Delete up to previous    dT  and so on  So as long as you learn the moving things start to get very interesting   Summing up  today I fell that emacs keybinds are faster for macro editing and vim commands are more powerfull for microediting   I ve been using vim for the last five years so I edit thinking mainly about words  lines  surrounding  blocks  etc  Delete this line  remove quotes  replace quotes  delete word in cursor  I m trying to findout the emacs moves for that  As a final quote I would say that  I care more about fzf than about emacs or vim  I would love to have a editor that is completely fzf based

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For me  emacs has better development tools not only tags based tools     Cedet c c    Xrefactory c c   java  Slime common lisp  JDEE java  ECB code browser  GDB Support NXML xml

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