I love VIM, learning tmux now and want to be pro with tmux+vim+zsh.
I like and love modes in VIM (some people can’t stand them - for me those are natural).
But some people say Emacs is better.
So I’ll give you my 2c, I recently started evaluating both of these again as well, primarily because I’d spent a bit of time with Vim and was preparing to spend potentially even more time in Vim, so wanted to check out just how good evil-mode in Emacs was.
The short version is, it’s pretty great, but I am still sticking with Vim + Tmux, primarily for pairing purposes
Stuff about emacs I loved:
package management is great!
a lot of your fav vim plugins are already ported, in very little lines of emacs lisp, which is something I’m very interested in
evil mode is the closest vim emulation I’ve come across (Have used Rubymines version too)
the ruby REPL is pretty damn awesome
Stuff about emacs I didn’t like so much
I could not only spend my whole time there, but I could pretty much get lost in amongst everything else
I don’t have the time to commit to properly learning the extra emacs stuff that falls outside of the evil-mode scope
I honestly suspect that once my 52pairs project is over, I’ll probably invest the time into using emacs, but right now its far easier for me to accomplish what I’m after with Vim and a smallish set of plugins. Not to mention, I haven’t felt like the async issues associated with vim are that much of an issue for me anyway, especially with vim-dispatch.
I think I will learn vim+tmux first.
As vim is everywhere.
I love vim modes and the way of editing.
Also tmux is used by emacs users anyway.
And then if vim will not be enough maybe I will invest time in learning emacs.
I’ve used both, and so far I really prefer Vim. Out of the box Vim is pretty good but in order to be awesome Vim needs plugins and customization to be really awesome. I guess that could be said of any editor though.
It’s really a preference thing, each of them aims to make you more efficient and a faster developer. I would just recommend you go with the one that makes you feel the most efficient and happiest to use. In the end the editor does not matter as much as the efficiency and speed at which great software is produced. No project manager ever said “oh no the project failed, because all the developers didn’t use Vim!”
Major wars have been started with threads like these, though I would expect on the upcase forums 99% of users are of the Vim persuasion.
Personally, I love Vim’s modal editing, but some of the features that Emacs has are simply amazing. Some examples are magit, e-shell, org-mode…the list goes on and on and on…
You should try out Spacemacs for a good marriage of the two.