The differences and pros and cons of commonly used editors, and cross-contrast editors

Now say the common editor, and we compare the differences between the editor and the pros and cons, I usually use the editor is vim, of course, there are many editors.

On this blue planet, there are legends of two great artifacts: Emacs is said to be the editor of God, and Vim is the god of the editor.

Emacs is an operating system disguised as an editor

There is an exaggerated saying: Emacs is an operating system disguised as an editor. It is not an exaggeration to think carefully.

Emacs is actually a Lisp interpreter, so you can use Lisp to expand flexibly. Lisp is something that is also a very powerful programming language. In the age when C was not invented, MIT's AI Lab wrote its operating system in part with assembly language and part of Lisp. Today, Lisp is still widely used in the field of AI research.

With such a powerful extended language, Emacs is destined to be in the direction of omnipotence. Gradually, people use Emacs is no longer limited to writing programs, writing documents, and in Emacs to manage the file system, running terminal, receiving mail, surfing the internet, listening to music. Even, someone uses Emacs to control the coffee machine to brew coffee.

This chatty extension, which deviates from the Unix philosophy of "a program does only one thing and does it well", is criticized by Unix's loyal users. But do you really deviate from it? Did Emacs say that he was an editor?

It is because of the invincible extensibility of Emacs that people want $ whether Emacs is an editor or not. But it is someone who likes this all-in-one philosophy and likes to do everything in Emacs. So someone will write "live in Emacs", so Emacs will become a kind of faith.

vim is not just VI

Vim is one of the most popular variants of VI, in addition to inheriting the VI swiftness of the editing method, the function of vim is much more powerful than the original VI. This also benefits from the ability to extend infinitely with vim scripts. There are already thousands of scripts on the vim.org, adding a variety of features and functions to vim.

In order to prove that the scalability of vim is not lost in Emacs, there are also user-written plugins that play games in Vim, run the shell, and integrate GDB's internal debugging in vim. Objectively speaking, the scripting language of vim is slightly inferior to the elisp of Emacs, but this does not prevent it from extending vim into a very good editor.

In the final analysis, Vim's predecessor VI and Emacs Design adopted a different philosophy, vi more in line with the Unix tradition, it through the pipeline mechanism and the system of various building block tools to deal with, it is fastidious with the system within the tool program to complete the user's task. Compared with Emacs, it is clearly positioned to be a powerful editor. As a result, most of the extensions of Vim are designed to better complete the task of editing text.

The Sea of the rivers, the capacity is large. Emacs and Vim can be one of the reasons why they can become "artifacts" by not being able to scale with other editors and absorbing the wisdom of the vast majority of users.