editor wars

it's probably safe to say that just about any newsgroup has had the vi vs emacs war at some point. nobody really touches the learning curve argument as they both have it, but usually the power of each is argued until godwin's law is eventually reached.

if you're looking at sheer power, then emacs probably wins. doing email, newsgroups, debugging, etc. all within your editor makes it more powerful. this seems to be the antithesis of the unix philosophy of one program that does one thing well. that argument is generally overlooked in the editor wars between the two.

back in '87 vi was the first real editor i used (learned on microsoft's xenix :) . there was no usable version of it on dos,  at least one that was cheap or free, so i hadn't used it for awhile. but when i got into linux around '94, vim was an editor usually installed by default so i made it a point of updating my vi skills to vim.

around '98 i made it a point of learning emacs, not so i could involve myself in any of the debates but just to add another tool to my toolbox.

but i didn't need full emacs. i have an email client i like better than the emacs effort. same with my newsreader. same with my debugger. and probably the same with every other extension you can get for emacs.

the other day my interested in emacs was  piqued again, so i installed the jasspa version of microemacs.    i've used other editors with emacs style keybinding (jed, etc.) but i find i end up spending more time configuring them. my intent on installing microemacs was to maybe config the colours for easier reading, but to leave it as stock as possible.

so reducing emacs to just the editor part with microemacs which one is better? i guess it depends if you like a moded editor or not. vim is great if you're a touch typist (as i am). you appreciate the one key commands as opposed to the finger contortions needed to do even simple tasks with emacs.

i'm far from a vim expert. there's all kinds key commands it has that i don't use and may never use. i'll at least get my emacs skills up to where i can get on a linux machine and use either one comfortably.

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