Vim vs Emacs: modal editing or a programmable workshop

The deepest difference is how you give commands. In Vim you spend most of your time in Normal mode, where letters are commands: w moves a word, d deletes, so dw deletes a word and ci( changes everything inside the parentheses. You press i to type text and Esc to stop. Commands combine like a small language (operator, then motion or text object), and . repeats the last change.

In Emacs the keyboard always types text, and commands live on modifier chords: Ctrl-f and Ctrl-b move forward and back a character, M-f (Alt+F) a word, Ctrl-k kills to the end of the line, and longer commands start with a prefix such as Ctrl-x. Anything without a key is one M-x away by name. There is no mode to forget you are in, which many people find easier at the start.

Both scale with practice. Vim's grammar means a few dozen keys combine into hundreds of edits; Emacs's named commands and chords mean everything is discoverable and rebindable. Which feels better is largely about how you like to think, and how your hands feel about Ctrl.

Both editors are programmable, to different depths. Vim is configured in Vimscript (and since Vim 9.0, the faster Vim9 script); Neovim adds Lua. Plugins add features on top of an editor whose core is written in C.

Emacs describes itself as "an extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor — and more", and its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp. Much of what you use is written in Lisp, and you can inspect, redefine or extend nearly any function while Emacs is running, then see the change at once. That is why people use Emacs as a mail client, file manager (Dired, built in), Git interface, or an editor for remote files (TRAMP, built in). The cost is that there is more to learn and more you can tinker with indefinitely.

Org mode is the feature people most often cite as a reason to use Emacs. It is a plain-text system for notes, outlines, to-do lists and agendas, authoring documents, and computational notebooks and literate programming, where code blocks in a document can be run and their results kept alongside. It ships with Emacs.

Vim has plugins that cover parts of this (outlining, to-do lists, wiki-style notes), and Org files are plain text you can edit anywhere, but nothing in the Vim world is as complete or as widely used as Org mode inside Emacs.

A small Vim config opens almost instantly, which suits a workflow of opening and closing the editor many times a day from a shell. An Emacs config that loads many packages takes longer to start, so a common Emacs habit is to start it once and keep it open. The Emacs manual describes running it as a server (emacs --daemon) and opening files with emacsclient, which reuses the running Emacs with its buffers and history; setting EDITOR to emacsclient makes other programs, such as Git, use it too.

Configuration frameworks on both sides put effort into lazy loading. Doom Emacs, for instance, lists startup and run-time performance as priorities.

You don't have to choose between the two styles of editing. Evil is an Emacs package that "emulates the main features of Vim": Normal, Insert and Visual modes, operators, motions, text objects, registers and macros, inside Emacs. It installs from MELPA or NonGNU ELPA.

Two popular configuration frameworks build on it:

• Doom Emacs calls itself "a configuration framework for GNU Emacs" and offers optional Vim emulation powered by Evil, alongside a non-Evil setup.
• Spacemacs is "a community-driven Emacs distribution" focused on Evil, with the motto that "the best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs and Vim".

If what draws you to Emacs is Org mode or Lisp, and what you like about Vim is the keys, this is the usual way to have both. Emacs also ships an older vi emulation, Viper, though most people who want Vim keys use Evil.

Vi and Emacs users have argued since at least the mid-1980s, when Usenet flame wars on the subject became a tradition. Much of it was always in good humour: Richard Stallman, who created GNU Emacs, plays "St IGNUcius" of the Church of Emacs, which holds that using a free version of vi is "not a sin but a penance". Both editors have now been in use for decades, both are actively developed, and plenty of people use both, often Vim (or vi) on servers and Emacs on their own machine.

If you learn Vim's motions, they work in Vim, Neovim, Emacs with Evil, and the Vim modes of VS Code, JetBrains IDEs and Zed, so learning them doesn't lock you into either side. You can practise them in a browser at the course or look them up in the cheat sheet.