Frequently Asked Question

Vim vs Emacs, which should I learn and what is the editor war?

Emacs and Vim are the two great elder editors of Unix culture. Emacs, originally a set of editor macros for the TECO editor in 1976 and reborn as Richard Stallman's GNU Emacs in 1985, is a Lisp environment that happens to come bundled with a text editor. Vim, descended from Bill Joy's 1976 vi, is a focused, modal, single-purpose editor that composes small commands into a grammar. Both have been actively developed for nearly fifty years; both have hundreds of thousands of regular users; both inspire devotion bordering on the religious.

The "editor war", half real, half running joke, dates to the 1980s Usenet flame wars and turns on irreconcilable design philosophies. Emacs argues that extensibility through a real programming language (Emacs Lisp) is worth the heavier memory footprint and the chorded key bindings (Ctrl- and Meta- prefixes for most commands). Vim argues that a small modal grammar means less typing and less wrist strain for the editing operations everyone does all day. Both sides have a point; the choice mostly reveals taste, not correctness.

Practical advice in 2026: learn enough vi to survive any Linux server (an hour of practice), then pick whichever full editor suits how you think. If you prize composability and keyboard efficiency, Vim or Neovim. If you want an editor that doubles as an email client, mail reader, terminal, and Org-mode task manager, Emacs. Many developers now use VS Code or another GUI editor day to day and keep Vim purely for SSH sessions; that is also a perfectly fine answer.