Vim Beats Emacs in 'Linux Journal' Reader Survey (linuxjournal.com)

The newly-relaunched Linux Journal is conducting its annual "Reader's Choice Awards," and this month announced the winners for Best Text Editor, Best Laptop, and Best Domain Registrar. Vim was chosen as the best editor by 35% of respondents, handily beating GNU Emacs (19%) Sublime Text (10%) and Atom (8%). Readers' Choice winner Vim is an extremely powerful editor with a user interface based on Bill Joy's 40-plus-year-old vi, but with many improved-upon features including extensive customization with key mappings and plugins. Linux Journal reader David Harrison points out another great thing about Vim "is that it's basically everywhere. It's available on every major platform."
For best laptop their readers picked Lenovo (32%), followed by Dell (25%) and System76 (11%). The ThinkPad began life at IBM, but in 2005, it was purchased by Lenovo along with the rest of IBM's PC business. Lenovo evolved the line, and today the company is well known as a geek favorite. Lenovo's ThinkPads are quiet, fast and arguably have one of the best keyboards (fighting words!). Linux Journal readers say Lenovo's Linux support is excellent, leaving many to ponder why the company doesn't ship laptops with Linux installed.
In February readers also voted on the best web browser, choosing Firefox (57%) over Chrome (17%) and Chromium (7%). And they also voted on the best Linux distribution, ultimately selecting Debian (33%), open SUSE (12%), and Fedora (11%).

Comments

Oh boy!

[Bearhouse]

It's popcorn time!

To paraphrase...

[Anonymous Coward]

vim is great because it's on all platforms is like saying anal sex is great because it works on all genders.

Re:To paraphrase...

[ShanghaiBill]

And easier to use.

Not easier to use. Just easier to learn.

You can learn to ride a tricycle easier than a bicycle. But you aren't going to win the Tour de France on a trike.

Re:To paraphrase...

[arth1]

and esc-colon-x

Or simply ZZ.

But these arguments are not in favor of vim, they're in favor of the vi family. I much prefer nvi over vim, not the least due to file locking, and also because undo/redo also works on undo/redo like in vi, while vim has this changed. In vi/nvi, you can hit u u and toggle between undo or not. Also, vim lacks the open mode of vi.

But I'm sure that votes came in for vim because that's the only flavor of vi the the voters knew about. Much like the WTF of more people voting for Chrome over Chromium. Did they actually know the differences, and voted due to that, or did they vote on the only thing they knew?

Well sure it does

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Most of the Emacs users are still waiting for it to load so they can cast their vote.

Re:Well sure it does

[SuperKendall]

That joke was funny maybeee back in 1998. Emacs hasn't gotten any more complex while CPU's have increased in power a few order of magnitudes so Emacs is quite the speed demon these days.

And still more powerful than Vim... I can run Vim inside Emacs after all.

Re:Well sure it does

[angel'o'sphere]

Emacs, a good operation system. But it lacks a decent editor.

Glad you now can run vim on (in) it.

Well, then.

[hey!]

I guess that's settled.

Re:Well, then.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, if only we'd thought of this sooner.

Re:Well, then.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Yes, it's confirmed - Vim is the Bud Light of text editors!

Ed is the standard text editor.

[zm]

Nuff said.

No Joe's Own Editor?

[greenwow]

Blasphemy. It emulates they keyboard commands from WordStar which the Borland tools also emulated. It's the choice of many old-school programmers.

Re:Ignores the same major issue as emacs:

[techno-vampire]

While it is true some variant of these are available everywhere, just like pico/nano, they can't be relied on to be an iteration of the application you know how to use.

That may be so, but nano, at least, puts the most common commands on the bottom of the screen, including the all-important keystroke that gets you into the rest of the help system. Of course, you need to know that ^X means what most people would write as CTRL+X, but anybody who's expecting to need to use an editor in a CLI shouldn't have any trouble with that.

Seems I am the odd man out with "Joe".

[gweihir]

Because I usually use "Joe", because of the WordStar compatibility, as I learned coding with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. I used Emacs for a while until the devel team there made some really stupid decisions, then I went back to Joe. So far it has compiled anywhere I tried and usually just works.

Re:Vim broken in OSX?

[Anonymice]

Odd, have you actually checked there aren't any other default schemes available? On all of the OSX, Linux, BSD & Cygwin Vims I've used, it's always included a standard pack to choose from.

http://vimcolors.com/

https://github.com/flazz/vim-c...

I've been using VIM for 20 years

[Barefoot Monkey]

I've been using VIM for 20 years.

I swear one of these days I'll figure out how to quit the damn thing!

Linux on the desktop

[tomhath]

The top vote getters for text editor are vim and emacs? That right there tells you why linux will never succeed on the desktop.

Re:Linux on the desktop

[UnknownSoldier]

/sarcasm Because in order for Linux to succeed on the desktop you need to run some slow, bloated, shitty ribbon bar IDE right?

It is obvious you don't deal with text day-in and day-out. Vim works because it becomes an extension of your mind once you learn how to use it. It is FAST. It can edit files of almost ANY size.

* Linux won in the server space. 100% of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world run Linux.
* Linux won in the mobile space. Linux runs on over 2 Billion monthly active devices.

That leaves the desktop space.

Guess what, no one gives a fuck that Windows dominates the desktop. People _already_ use Linux on the desktop. The only ones complaining about the "quantity" is you.

Sigh

[fahrbot-bot]

Linux Journal reader David Harrison points out another great thing about Vim "is that it's basically everywhere. It's available on every major platform."

So is Emacs ding-dong.

My $0.02 - I'm a long-time Emacs and Vi user - since the mid 1980s. I use Vi /Vim for short/quick edits and Emacs for things I want more of an IDE. Vim is a fine, fairly simple, text editor and Emacs is, well, Emacs. Granted the learning curve for Emacs much higher to really take advantage of it, but it's well worth it over the long run. If I could only have one editor, it would be Emacs - no question.

Re:Sigh

[chthon]

If only because the buffer and windows system from Emacs is still miles ahead of that in Vim.

Re:Ignores the same major issue as emacs:

[menkhaura]

"Every version is subtly different, and just because you can use the modern version doesn't mean you know the subset of common features that work everywhere."

You are talking about the many vi clones that exist or existed (nvi, elvis, ex-vi, stevie etc). while the article mentions the One True Editor that came to rule them all, Vim, created by Bram Moolenaar. Today any *nix distribution is guaranteed to have vim available, and there is no such difference of common features anymore.

Re:Ignores the same major issue as emacs:

[Dutch Gun]

I had to work remotely on some Macs on my last job, and only had a terminal interface via SSH. nano was my editor of choice. It was there, and reasonably simple to use for what I needed. So, yeah, I agree its ease-of-use is a bonus. I'll typically just fire up nano for editing small text or config files if I've already got a terminal open, but for actual programming work, I tend to use an IDE.

I'm not sure I understand the logic of people who argue about "efficiency" though, at least when it comes to programming. In my experience, writing good code isn't about furiously typing as fast as you can, so I've never felt motivated to learn a bunch of keyboard-only shortcuts.

In other news...COBOL beats FORTRAN

[Tony Isaac]

C'mon people! There are so many great editors out there today that are actually modern.

- Notepad++
- Sublime Text
- Visual Studio Code
- Visual Studio

These editors can do all the important stuff that vim and emacs could do, and you don't have to memorize a whole list of commands to use them!

Vim isn't just an editor

[slaymaker1907]

Vim is really more a style of keybindings than strictly an editor at this point.