Emacs vs VimEdit

Both are fantastic editors and they have a lot of strengths in common:

  • extremely powerful
  • once user is proficient, extremely efficient workflows are available
  • active, vibrant, helpful user communities
  • loads of great documentation

And they also have some weaknesses in common too:

  • require a lot of tinkering to set up functionality which users might be accustomed to from IDEs
  • integration with IDEs such as Xcode (API documentation, intelligent code completion etc) is always going to lag behind that of a "true" IDE

Vim advantages

  • a configuration file format I can actually understand without having to take a course on functional programming
  • fast and lightweight
  • excellent native Mac OS X implementation; no confusion about which implementation to choose

Vim disadvantages

  • initial experience extremely difficult for people accustomed to non-modal editors

Emacs advantages

  • infinitely configurable

Emacs disadvantages

  • multiple competing Mac OS X implementations from different vendors; which one is "the" authoritative one?
  • relatively heavyweight