Re: Emacs's popularity

[William Case <billlinux@rogers.com>]

Hi;

On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 23:37 +0200, Teemu Likonen wrote:
> Jonathan Groll (2008-12-15 23:09 +0200) wrote:
> 
> > Sadly, vim outvotes all flavours of GNU emacs on the above graph when
> > added to it (although to be fair, on Debian emacs is not installed by
> > default but some flavour of vi is).
> 
> Yes, nowadays Vim is in every Debian installation (priority "important"
> for vim-tiny). The popularity graph by installs (percent) shows that
> vim-common is basically in everyone's system:
> 
>     http://preview.tinyurl.com/6g934p
> 
> But Vim is not only installed; it's really used a lot. In Debian Vim has
> always been a bit more popular than Emacs but in the first half of 2007
> Vim really got popular (around Vim 7.1 and Debian 4.0 release). This
> "used actively" graph compares vim-common, emacs21-bin-common and
> emacs22-bin-common packages:
> 
>     http://preview.tinyurl.com/5thmmx

My experience is that a Linux user, particularly a new user, should take
a couple of hours to learn the rudiments of each.  Not only to make an
informed choice about whether emacs or vim suits them best as a text
editor, but also because most of the key strokes for command line
programs are based on one or the other, e.g. readline on emacs; less on
vi.  It took me a couple of years to fully understand that if I learnt
those two programs (vi and emacs), I didn't have to memorize hundreds of
key strokes for all my utility programs.
-- 
Regards Bill
Fedora 9, Gnome 2.22.3
Evo.2.22.3.1, Emacs 22.2.1