[donatj]

I’ve always been a vi/vim guy, it’s not a religious thing, it’s just a decently powerful editor available on most servers I managed to kind of get my head around enough to be productive. I find the weird holy war between the two strange and kind of a turn off.

[JHonaker]

I don’t think anyone actually thinks it’s anything other than a joke. Hell, many Emacs users use a very complete Vim emulation package called Evil. In fact, the two most popular “pre-configured setups” are designed around Vim keys.

[dotancohen]

After decades of using VIM, then NeoVim, I now use Emacs with Evil. The old joke that Emacs is a terrific OS but missing a decent text editor is truer today more than ever.

[protomyth]

I get the feeling a lot of vi/vim users are folks who do sysadmin (whatever fun title that has this year) and vi/vim are installed on the box by default. You don't need a very deep knowledge of vi/vim to be productive. Its basically single page cheat-sheet to be productive enough for a lot of jobs, and it works ok over a low bandwidth connection.

[skissane]

I discovered GNU Emacs while at secondary school. Started out running it under OS/2 (using EMX), later switched to Linux. I spent countless hours studying in awe it’s gazillion features (and that was 25+ years ago now, the features have only multipled since.) It seemed more like a work of art than a kitchen sink. But I didn’t really use it in anger for much, because I didn’t have much to actually use it for.

Never got into vi, it seemed weak and unfriendly - until I got my first real job. I was primarily a developer, but did a bit of sysadmin on the side, and hung out with the sysadmins a lot. And all the Solaris boxes had vi, and trying to get emacs installed was too much work. And I became quite good friends with one of the sysadmins in particular, who was a big vim fan.

20 years later, I use MacVIM every day. And on the rare occasion I start emacs, I’m struggling to remember how to do anything.

[JackMorgan]

I tend to think Vim is the best editor, and Emacs is the best OS. So I use Vim inside Emacs with Evil mode.

[seanw444]

I think most people do. Spacemacs and Doom Emacs agree.

[Ferret7446]

The war is indeed strange since emacs is not so much an editor as it is a customizable shell. It's better to compare emacs to bash or zsh.