Ask HN: Emacs or Vim? And why?

vim, because that's what I know. Look, very few people know both well enough to comment. Also, people are hugely biased by their past experiences. If your editor let you do everything perfectly, except it had one annoying bug, you might hate it and say to others to never use it again.

That said, vim is great because it makes you more producitve than not vim. I moved to it from the likes of NetBeans, Notepad++, etc. years ago. It took me about a day to become as productive in vim as I was in Notepad++. After that I got much more productive than I could have been with Notepad++ over the years. It's possible I would have been even more productive with Emacs, but I picked vim because that's what was installed on the system at the time.

Are you an octopus? Emacs

Are you not an octopus? vim

Joke aside - both are fine and take different models of composure to achieve what is more or less the same thing. Pick whichever is most comfortable for you.

I prefer vim and am eagerly waiting for Neovim to be released.

On remote servers: VIM since it is extremely likely to be installed.

On desktop: Emacs in EVIL (VIM) mode. Love the quick key-navigation capabilities I get from VIM backed by the expressive power of Emacs.

vim. I used to be an emacs user, for years, but I found that vim was actually easier for common operations. (I barely use advanced vi/vim features; the most complicated thing I frequently do in vim is use replacements on selections. Doing the same thing is almost certainly possible in emacs, but I have no idea where to even start in figuring out how.)