I am also surprised by this. What are you basing it on? For arbitrarily comparable online communities, it looks like emacs.stackexchange.com is twice as active as vi.stackexchange.com

> ...the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim.

> What are you basing it on? ... it looks like emacs.stackexchange.com is twice as active as vi.stackexchange.com

A couple of things about this. For myself and many others, the reason I started vi in the first place is it's been installed by default on many kinds of machines. On SCO Unix and AIX from my youth, for example, this was the editor you used on a vanilla install of a machine to get things going. So this is part of why the install base is larger.

Another part of why the emacs community is more active is that Vi is just an editor, while emacs is more of a programming language and I daresay nearly an operating system in its own right. Because of the amazing power and flexibility of emacs there's a lot more stuff to discuss for Emacs than Vi.

When I was teaching myself to program, I had a night job in a warehouse. It so happened that the inventory software was on a UNIX server, and we accessed it through a terminal emulator from our windows computer. I discovered one day that I could exit the inventory software and end up with a shell prompt, and that the server had Perl available.

My computer books convinced me that emacs was the better editor, but it wasn’t installed on the server. vi was. So I learned vi and Perl on my lunch breaks.

Stack Overflow survey (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e...) has Vim at ~25% while Emacs is at 4.5%.

it also has notepad++ at 30.5% - I've seen one or two people who would use notepad++ when nothing else is available, but I don't think many people have it as their primary IDE.

Also, if you sum up all the JetBrains products (which you can get as IntelliJ Ultimate if you shell out the money), you land in the vicinity of 63% (not vim-related but a neat fact)

Emacs is more complex, and Emacs users do more in Emacs than just edit text. (think org-mode, debugger frontends, mail readers, etc.)

Well vi or vim is nearly always installed by default everywhere, but emacs rare is so.

Vi users RTFM.

I love emacs, but I taught myself to use vi because I know when I ssh into a remote server there will have a vi.

Emacs has an edit-over-ssh mode that's pretty useful.

Yes Tramp mode.

You can do that in vim via scp like this:

vim scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt

Even if it's a Cisco router and there are no text files other than a note.txt 'Here be dragons'

I've always assumed the opposite with how people say emacs is a nice OS and poor editor... What does Vim over emacs?

It's not a comment on quality or usefulness, and only indirectly its resource consumption (vi/vim consumes less than emacs in its default configuration), it's really about standards.

vi and the ex editor language are part of the POSIX standard and were around early in the history of BSD. See the history here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi

For a well worn joke on the subject, "Ed is the standard!": https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

I love Emacs and have been using it for years but whenever I want to make a really quick edit, i.e. writing a git commit I almost always reach for vi because by the time Emacs loaded I would've been done committing with vi, at least with a slower machine.

I know some people run Emacs in daemon mode, but it's not always convenient to do that

This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least

> This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least

You could use emacs for that. Editing over ssh using TRAMP works perfectly in every case I've used it.

1) vim is easier on your hands if you're on a high-latency connection (i.e. usable in a terminal) and/or get tired of chording (i.e. having to press Ctrl along with random keys).

2) I've found vim's plugin systems (Pathogen, Vundle, vim-plug) vastly more intuitive than Emacs' version with package-install and activating one of several repositories (Milk, ELPA, MELPA, whatever) - you install the same plugin regardless of whether you're using Vundle or vim-plug

3) vim and its packages are vastly easier to configure - this is subjective and may be much improved in Doom Emacs/Spacemacs, but in general vim packages have a bunch of global variables that you can set to a number or a string whereas most emacs packages need you to define elisp functions and/or nontrivial data structures, with no sane defaults to fall back on if you want things just to work

It’s composability is Vim’s killer feature.

This post is what got me started on Vim: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...

this is huge flamewar territory, but this is a bit 'off' question wise - alot of the current state of things is due to historical precedent - some details:

- (original) vi was on most unices from the mid-80s onwards out of the box

- (gnu/lucid) emacs was an additional install (not getting into other emacs flavors - original teco emacs was fairly small i believe).

- original vi just had basic editing and at some point a hardcoded lisp mode, no addons vs gnu emacs which was a programmable editing environment running within a lisp interpreter - remeber in the early days, people built whole custom hardware to be able to run lisp with sufficient complexity (see also: lisp machines, twenex, etc), so using lisp for your editor was in some sense the definition of 'overkill', depending on ones view of what an editor should do

- Also, from late-80s->90s era if you wanted a GUI for your text editor you probably used emacs, and real vi never had a gui option - put another way emacs was the only one of the two linked to gui libraries.

- vim vs vi: most obvious difference (IMHO) feature wise is that vim adds vimscript, which is an interpreted programming language, so now editing modes are extensible, etc (as was the case in emacs before). detail: vim codebase is not based on vi codebase.

since vi was just about everywhere and emacs was a (fairly large) package, you had more general vi knowledge vs emacs 'in the culture' since even an emacs user might need to know vi but not usually the other way around, and so vi (later vim, as linux distros switched their 'default vi' to 'vim') gained more install base by default. Then, people hearing about emacs likely hear the 'vi vs emacs' arguments and never try it since there are now many more choices, they've learned vi, they prefer an IDE, etc (in the old days there was much less choice, main 2 were vi and emacs, and emacs was probably somewhere on your managed LAN somewhere if you wanted to give it a shot)

most of the 'vi vs emacs' arguments are rooted in the real-vi vs fsf-emacs era and are basically obsolete in a modern vim era, since everyone is using gui library vim with vimscript, which basically means the same thing in terms of 'bloat' (both editors contain engines to display text in cli or gui mode and embed a language interpreter). Basically what was once valid internet lore kept getting past down, and the 'minimalism' of vim was confused with being 'minimal' in terms of what people meant in the original vi-vs-emacs discussions. Emacs does contain 'non editor' functions e.g. networking, etc, so the core is probably a bit bigger than the core of vim, but when people are still using these comparisons and talking about 'emacs bloat' while their preferred editor is some electron based thing, we've lost a bit of the point/message..

> vim vs vi: most obvious difference (IMHO) feature wise is that vim adds vimscript IMHO, the most obvious difference is that in vim you can kinda just press "i" and pretend its a normal text editor. You know, the kind anyone coming from another OS would already be familiar with. Try doing this in regular vi, and you'll be cursing and pulling your hair out.

Today, I don't put much stock into anyone expressing an opinion in the "vi vs emacs" wars, because 90% of the people claiming a preference for vi seem to actually be vim users. Using vim is a much more pleasant experience than using good old classic vi.