I informed them that I'm not very experienced working on Linux, so I had no real opinion. We had some light conversation for ten minutes and then one of the guys said: "ok, now for the truly important question - Vim or Emacs?".
I've practically lived inside Visual Studio professionally for 10 years give or take, but for this job I'll be working full time on the linux platform for the first time in my life.ĭuring one of the interview meatings I was seated in the middle of the developer room to socialize with the crowd. Just some things to consider.I'm starting a new job next month.
See above about how you are supposed to Navigate in Command mode. Many people are just worried if their arrow keys work in Insert mode. I recommend people who are curious about the true “differences” start with something like “Your problem with Vim is that you don’t grok vi.” by Jim Dennis on StackOverflow and go from there.īut the reality is that only serious Unix / Linux sysadmins will even care about the differences. There is no such thing as “Normal” mode you “navigate” in Command mode. ~ 250K for vi and ~ 470k for nvi!īy the way, vi itself only has _2_ modes: Command mode & Insert mode You don’t even touch on the biggest complaint (aside from compatibility) that vi users have: how slow and bloated “vim” has become.
In fact, it is the DEFAULT vi implementation on Arch Linux as opposed to many systems that symlink “vi” to vim and ignore all the ways that vi and vim are different.
The source code can be compiled on almost any system. Second, “vi” is not ONLY available on Unix. There are many assertions and assumptions in the article that seem to ignore the ACTUAL similarities and differences.įor one, while “vi” does not have a “Visual mode”, it arguably does not NEED one since “Marks” have been a part of “vi” since the late 1970’s. In fact while nvi (New vi) DOES have a ruler, it is formatted differently.
Original vi does not have that sort of “ruler” with the row and column at the bottom. Next time try “:ver” to check what you are actually using. Your first supposed screenshot of “vi” shows that. Maybe it is vim-tiny or vim-minimal, bit still some form of “vim”. It is the question of all questions-vim or emacs The Editor Wars have raged for decades, Vimmers versus Emacsians, with the occasional Nano fanboy getting. It looks like the “vi” you are showing may just be a symlink to “vim”. To search for a word use forward slash followed by the word to search followed by enter. To search in the file you must be in command line mode. Move the cursor to upward direction by one lineīoth the editors provide the option to search for text in the file. Move the cursor to downward direction by one line Shortcuts for navigating within VIM vs VI are the same. To enter insert mode, hit the “Escape” key and type in ‘i’. To enter command-line mode hit the “ Escape” key and then type in the colon ‘:’. The command mode is for specifying commands to exit, save your work, and perform other operations. Insert mode allows you to make changes to your content. In normal mode, you can just view your text and navigate through it (more on that later). Command: For Operations like saving, exiting, etc.īy default, you are in Normal mode.Insert: For inserting and modifying text.Modes in VIM vs VIīoth the editors are mode based, that is you need to enter INSERT mode to edit and COMMAND mode to perform actions like saving and undo. You can see that there is no difference in the appearance of the two.