Emacs vs. vim Real World Analogy: Cargo Bike Vs. Folding Bike

Here's another real world comparison, although they are often problematic when you take those comparisons too seriously or you did not think it through properly. They always do have their problems when it comes to details, of course.

As I've stated already in Emacs is Not Just An Editor, I don't think that those editor wars do serve any useful purpose. I'm using both, vim and Emacs, for decades on a daily basis.

(Please note that I'm using "vim" as a term for the whole family of editors: vi, vim, neovim, ...)

I got the impression that most users of vim do not have the full picture when they complain about alleged downsides of the Emacs platform. And not every argument is meant in a jokingly fashion.

The earliest point in time where I myself was able to grasp the fundamental difference of Emacs to basically any other software, not just vim as a text editor, was only a couple years(!) before I started to embrace it. Some people will be faster in understanding all the impact, I'm sure. Unfortunately, from my experience most users of vim never got near that point in time.

Therefore, I think that comparisons from real world scenarios may be able to help to bridge this gap a bit. Let's try this one using a bicycle metaphor.

So when it comes to bicycles, vim is like a folding bike:

• small
• versatile when it comes to size/storage
• quick
• agile

Emacs, on the other hand, can be seen as a cargo bike:

• heavier
• typically of larger size
• versatile when it comes to transport of goods and multiple people

A cargo bike also gets you from A to B by pedaling but it is so much more than just a bike. If you want, you can carry kids, goods, plants, all sorts of equipment. Some people even use it as a platform to build, e.g., a mobile café shop.

One of the surprising things is how you'll find much more use of it when you actually have one over a longer period of time.

A folding bike - as cool as it is - will always be just a folding bike with its particular but limited focus.

A cargo bike has so much more potential to realize your ideas than a normal bike.

If you're specifically looking for a small, versatile bike, you'll never choose a cargo bike and you should refrain from telling people how bad a cargo bike is for folding. That's quite an obvious statement. If you're looking for a folding bike, a cargo bike is most probably a bad idea, yes.

However, a cargo bike serves as a replacement for a normal bike in the similar way as a folding bike does.

So what about people who started with a folding bike and then got more and more great ideas that would require a cargo bike? Well with the availability of folding cargo bikes you may bridge the gap.

For Emacs, this can be compared to the availability of various vim-emulators like Evil. Emacs frameworks like Spacemacs or Doom Emacs do come with various vim-patterns enabled by default.

This leads to the fact that many die-hard vim users discovered that Emacs is actually the much better vim if you dare this experiment for yourself: Emacs can do anything that vim is able to do except Vimscript.

Unfortunately and from its architecture, vim can only provide a tiny small sub set of the Emacs (Elisp) platform which defines its strict limitations in that sense. So it can never be the other way round where vim is able to provide all the nifty features of the Emacs platform since it's just a really great editor and not an extremely versatile platform. It's almost as if you're comparing a word processor with an operating system. It's pointless.

I am using Emacs since the 90s and vim since the early 2000s - both with their native keyboard bindings: vim with vim keyboard shortcuts, Emacs with its own bindings. Yes, I still use vim on a daily basis for small editing tasks, composing my personal emails within mutt, and so forth. It works for me.

For anything else that deals with text, knowledge management, spreadsheets, diagrams, ... I'm using my Emacs. Not because of any religious belief or unquestioned habit. It's simply the best tool for most jobs I can think of. And no, vim could only do so much (or so little) of that.

The point is: since it is not easy to get to the point of understanding all the consequences of the Emacs platform, people who did not have that experience yet should listen to arguments of people who do have that experience, maybe even using both tools for their workflows.

Religious wars do not help here at all since even when used in a humorous way, "outsiders" still may take them seriously and miss the really cool stuff.

Furthermore, people often fall for the fallacy of discussing tools when they actually should discuss methods and workflows. And most important: people should stop discussing tools or workflows without also mentioning their particular (and prioritized) set of requirements. As an example, it's absolutely pointless to discuss Windows vs. Linux with a person who depends on a particular software that requires exactly one operating system.

So if you really need an amazing cool text editor only, you can either stick to vim or Emacs - it doesn't matter which.