Question of the Day: Vi or Emacs? Why?

[redrose]

I need to learn a stronger editor than pico, and I don't know which of these to choose.

I expect to be working in a unix/linux system for much of my career.

Vi allows regular expressions, which could be very useful.

Emacs is extensible, which could be very useful.

Any thoughts?

Comments

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

Does emacs not allow regular expressions? I'm astonished to hear that - if nothing else, if it doesn't natively, there's almost certainly an extension for it.

At any rate, if what you want to do with your text editor is edit text, vi is a pretty good balance between 'simple to use' and 'powerful' - a reasonably clueful user could probably master it in a couple days. In the Linux world, there's several different versions floating around, so you might be able to try a couple out and see what makes you happiest.

Emacs is kind of insane. It wouldn't surprise me to find out you could put a man on the moon and achieve world peace using only emacs with the right extensions loaded, but you'd have to memorize a thousand different keystroke combinations and maybe learn Lisp to get the job done. 20 years ago, I liked that you could tell it "I'm coding in C today" and it would automatically indent and highlight all your missing brackets for you, but I think one variant of vi will also do that, and I don't even know if that's relevant to you.

[redrose3125.livejournal.com]

Yeah, emacs probably does, but I'd have to figure out how.