Nerdcore 4 Life

I just bumped into a very old article on Vim vs. Emacs and it had a few interesting points. The fact that Vi was designed to run over a 300 baud modem was something I never knew. The gist seems to be that Vi was built to be as powerful an editor as possible with a very light footprint. It didn’t take up much memory or use a lot of bandwidth in a remote terminal. Emacs, on the other hand, was made by people with much greater computing resources. That’s why Emacs is built on top of the OS to do a million different things and Vi was built to use the OS(for things like ‘ls’ or ‘awk’).

So why then is Vi still around? Why is Vim still being developed? It was created during the computing equivalent of the paleozoic, how can a thin program still be useful? After all, Joel On Software tells us that features are what people want. Shouldn’t the more feature rich Emacs be the choice for programmers? It has a built in email client for God’s sake!

Well, no. Features are not what people want, useful features is. An email client doesn’t help me edit text files in the slightest. And the same goes with extensibility and options, useful is good and useless is bad. While Emacs has proven itself more extensible than Vi(or Vim) it isn’t more useful than Vim. That’s why an editor designed to be used over TTY is still prominent.

A less philosophical reason for Vim’s persistence, chorded keys suck. The Control and Alt keys are in the least convient places possible on a keyboard and constantly having to press them is a pain the ass. While command mode/insert mode is unintuitive, it works well by allowing me to avoid having to press 4 keys at once.

And for those who say that Vim has chorded keys too, that’s right. But I map them away. So instead of <Cntrl-[> to enter command mode I press ‘ii’(how many words have 2 i’s in a row?) See, Vim’s customizable too.