Of course it's tongue in cheek. Vim is venerable high quality software that a lot of people love. Emacs people dunking on vim (and vice versa) is just an old traditional joke with no actual animus behind it.
The only similarities between Vim and Emacs are their ages and the fantastic communities
- both require a large investment to achieve mastery.
- both deliver excellent return on that investment. Proficient use "looks like magic."
- both include (seriously underrated) tutorial software to get new users up and running.
- both are still described as "hard to learn" by people who don't use them.
- both have more popular competitors that are less capable but easier to pick up and use without thinking about it (various IDEs for Emacs, pico/nano for vim).
I don't know what your problem is here, but you'd do better stating it outright. As it is, you're just embarrassing yourself. If age and community are the only similarities between Vim and and Emacs, the one of them is not a Unix text editor.
Correct, but given the lingering sense of the two editors being polar opposites, left behind from centuries-past flame wars of the internets, both vim and emacs users are likely to come forward, just to see what the fuss is about.
I think that's almost 100% cultural thing. I know both editors quite well now, and to learn them I had to read tons of people's posts and such. In Emacs (unofficial) writings I saw much more "holier-than-thou" attitude, similar to what they call "smug lisp weenies". Vim's writings are down to earth, focused on pragmatics and making no unneeded comparisons.
While technically Emacs users and advocates are right, they lose big time in "marketing" or "public relations". I don't really think that this is going to be fixed.
I considered that, but I thought it was fair to consider them one in the context of the history of vim vs emacs competition, especially since both the original Emacs and GNU Emacs were written by RMS.
Did you just imply that all vim or emacs users live in "rich daddys attic"? Do you have any idea how many things have been created by people in a flavor of vi or emacs?
Who is missing the obvious here?
I find it really amusing that the vim ecosystem is reinventing emacs, more slowly, in a worse language. There are some really amazing, really smart people (like Tim Pope), creating some really amazing, really cool software — I can only imagine how much more effective they'd be if they were working in a better environment.
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