vi vs emacs flamewars

vi vs emacs flamewars

One point that our esteemed editor may be missing in his observation on
the vi vs Emacs flame wars, is that there is a non-insignificant number of
people who dislike both vi and Emacs :-) (deploying anti-flame
shielding...) This is virtually anybody who did not learn to program under
Unix.

For years now I have been deliberately forcing myself to use vim for
absolutely every task which doesn't require major editing - e.g.
configurations, small scripts, etc. I have to admit it still makes me want
to scream and break my keyboard. It also made adopt the terrible habit of
constantly and needlessly hitting Esc even when I am using other editors.

Subjectively Emacs does look a lore more workable, but the fact remains
that to me both Emacs and Vi have that 70-s feel to them.

Here is a trivial feature that, as far as I can tell, they are both
missing: marking text with shift+arrows. The logic tells me
that using control combinations may be more ergonomic than using the
arrows, but I doubt I will ever be able to stop using them ... I am
spoiled for ever - subjectively the best editor I ever used was Microsoft
Visual C 4. (Note that it isn't about the GUI - I actually prefer to run
an editor in a text terminal)