VIM 6.0 is Out

LinuxNews.pl writes "It's more then a year after releasing the first 6.0 alpha. Lot's of improvements (i.e. you can edit files via FTP!) - check them out on vim.org" Of course everyone knows that vim is the best text editor in the world. Anyone who tells you differently is either wrong, lying, or criminally insane. (Or an emacs user, in which case they are wrong, lying and criminally insane).

Comments

Re:what's the difference?

[garett_spencley]

The two editors evolved differently. Vim started as 100% compatible vi clone with extra features, while emacs was an attempt to create a 100% free (as in speech) text editor when the alternatives were vi (closed source commercial implementations), pico etc.

So in a nutshell here are the differences:

o Emacs uses lisp to completely customize the editor. Vim uses it's own little scripting language to do syntax highlighting, create shortcuts etc...

o Vim is just an editor. Emacs will do everything except pick your nose (ei: check e-mail, surf the net, even play games). You can also write Emacs extensions with emacs-lisp to get it to pick your nose if you really want it to.

o The interface is quite different. Vim (like vi) has editing mode and command mode. Emacs just has editing mode. Both are command-driven though unless you use gvim or XEmacs - in that case you get an X11 user interface.

There are lots of other differences feature wise but these are the big ones. The best suggestion I can give you is to just try both. They are both relatively hard to learn since you have to memorize a lot of commands. But once you have them down pat they easily become two of the best text editors available.

One thing to note though: because they are hard to learn it's suggested that you only pick them up if you do a LOT of text-editing (programmers for example). They really are programmers editors and not for people who just want to create the odd ascii file. Do not use them expecting something like notepad for windows. If you do you will hate them.

--
Garett

Re:CT's bias

[A Commentor]

Making the editor's comments appear as a comment would actually be a great idea...

It gives moderators the ability to mod them down, and ALSO, no one would be able to claim '1st post'.