Emacs is not a text editor. Emacs is a portable programming platform and text editing is just the default application implemented on it.

Sounds like overkill to me.

Yet we have entire editors that do far less that require a entire web browser and take 100+ Meg's of ram to run.

Edit: gigabytes of ram.

That's overkill too.

"There are two kinds of overkill: the sort of overkill that lets you write Gameboy emulators, or Enterprise overkill; the sort of overkill that’s only bloat. I have no patience for useless things."

Who said that?

username223

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

In the Emacs case, Stallman just made that explicit, implementing Lisp from the start.

Quite a lot of things we do on the computer involves manipulating text.

It’s an okay operating system, but it could use a good text editor.

I am not an emacs or vim user, but doesn't emacs support vim style editing(key bindings) or it supports just a subset of vim?

> It’s an okay operating system, but it could use a good text editor.

is an old meme.

> I am not an emacs or vim user, but doesn't emacs support vim style editing(key bindings) or it supports just a subset of vim?

it supports quite a bit via Evil.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

Or via doom emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Doesn't Doom use Evil?

Entirely possible. I just use vim :p

It offers pretty complete Vim keybindings, enough for me to switch seamlessly between Emacs and Vim.

Unless you are a Vim connoisseur you will not be disappointed.

Vim style is not Vim. Tons of editors and IDEs support Vim style key bindings. Not one of them works for me. Even evil mode, which has undeniably put the most effort into duplicating Vim features, breaks my expectations enough to be annoying and sending me back to Vim.

How? Is there something fundamentally incompatible between Emacs and Vim commands that makes emulation slightly off?

One example is the } motion (and its corresponding backward version) which in evil mode makes use of Emacs forward-paragraph function. This function is customized by a lot of major modes such that the behaviour is highly file-specific. I much prefer Vim's predictable motions which are the same for every file.

It's mainly different enough so that an experienced Vim user is forced to relearn keybindings and habits while also searching for plugins able to replace the ones in Vim.

Also Emacs cannot be 100% Vim compatible because their control schemes are so different, example: The cursed Esc key which doesn't work properly even in Spacemacs. There's a huge difference between Emacs with some Vim commands and Vim with Emacs functionality.

So, I'm staying with Vim and if others prefer Emacs that's fine too.

Yes, Emacs supports full vim-style editing via Evil.

Emacs has the best implementation of vim.

Proof: https://youtu.be/Uz_0i27wYbg