[anschwa]

The way I see it, emacs is really an idea.

Vim is a text editor that grew into an ecosystem of people bolting on additional functionality. While extensibility is possible, it's nowhere near as transparent and consistent as the emacs environment. In fact no system I know of comes even close.

Emacs paved the way for the features we take for granted in graphical applications like undo, copy+paste, search, find+replace, spell check, project navigation, code completion, auto-formatting, and of course, plugins.

These days, indeed much of the appeal is gone if all you're doing is comparing features at a surface level.

Yes, it looks like all editors "do the same thing" but really emacs is quite different in spirit.

[colordrops]

If emacs adopted vim-like keybindings early on the war would have ended. It's the only reason I stick with vim, and I suspect I'm not alone. Yes, yes, evil mode and whatever, but it's not seamless - you still have to get familiar with emacs keybindings.

[anschwa]

I'm not sure I agree keybindings were/are the significant factor. The editors have a completely different history and their authors come from very different backgrounds.

[colordrops]

I'm talking about the war of usage/mindshare rather than a war between the authors.

[mcbuilder]

I am not sure. Sure with deamon mode and lazy loading emacs can be really fast to start up and open files nowadays, but the old joke was EMACS stood for "eights megs and constantly swapping". Evil mode is just the more recent iteration of vim keybindings in EMACS that go all the way back to modes like viper mode.

[colordrops]

Most vi users actually use vim or neovim with complicated configs and dozens of plugins - setting up daemon mode and lazy loading would not be a problem. Emacs would be my daily driver if it had native vi keybindings. And i could go back to vi/vim if I logged into a server and had to edit a file.

[coliveira]

It they do a vim emulation that is good enough, then Emacs will eventually vanish... everyone will effectively use vim on different implementations.

[mattl]

Emacs was 21-ish when vim came along

[samatman]

vi and emacs were released in the same year.

The fact that vi iMproved became the dominant implementation isn't particularly relevant here.

[BeetleB]

> The fact that vi iMproved became the dominant implementation isn't particularly relevant here.

I think it is. Most vim users I know have never used vi and would hate it.

As a reminder: In vi, when you go into "insert" mode, you cannot edit anything prior to where the cursor was when you entered insert mode. vim got rid of such annoyances.

[samatman]

The topic of discussion was:

> If emacs adopted vim-like keybindings early on

I consider it obvious that "vim-like" keybindings are also "vi-like" keybindings, and that emacs could in fact have adopted them before the invention of vim.

It wouldn't have of course; when the Editor Wars were truly raging, the modal vs. modeless debate was at the heart of the partisanship. But that's a separate question.

[mattl]

Are vim users going to be able to use vi? Genuine question. I’ve barely used either.

[colordrops]

Yes, vim is a superset of vi

[ed25519FUUU]

Vi/m won the distribution war. It’s everywhere. It’s on every Unix-like system I’ve ever used.

[GlennS]

On the other hand, Emacs keybindings are the default at every terminal.

[lenkite]

1 liner change by set -o vi and you can live in a better world.

[nemosaltat]

Discovering emacs on OS X Tiger was my first true introduction to the power of TUI/CLI. I use vim now, and Atom with vim bindings, but I have to agree that there’s something special about the spirit of emacs.

[coliveira]

Emacs is a good programming environment, but it's a bad editor. They should have spent a little more time thinking about decent keybindings.