I hit the 20 minute mark fast and I feel like I barely scratched the surface of some of these differences and how I came to form my opinions around them. If there are any particular points that warrant a more focused video, please let me know. Edit: Audio muffles around 0:30 but is back by 1:37

Luke Smith has changed

by far, my favorite Luke Smith fork! subbed

EMACS! EMACS! EMACS! EMACS! * explodes due to lack of emacs *

blasphemous lisp slander... *starts shouting emacs*

Only the 3rd video and already surpassing the bald luke in terms of quality

I love the way you format these so much. It may be at odds with growing more quickly but there's nothing I'd want to change (Noises from the city included). Was at first hesitant to click on this video but as soon as I realized it was you I knew I'd enjoy it immediately

I've tried Emacs, but my Neovim setup is perfect for me. I'm not going to use anything else.

IMO the biggest hurdle for learning Lua to configure nvim is understanding its only data structure - the table. If you get its semantics and how to manipulate it, it's a breeze. I use Fennel to transpile to Lua for my config, and using a Lisp to manage tables has been a blessing.

1 vim has guis gvim. 2. Neovim has GUI clients available that talk to a Neovim process local or remote 3. Neovim can also support graphics in the terminal using certain packages that support terminals with graphics protocols such as iTerm, Kitty etc

Neovim isn't necessary on the terminal, they made significant refactors over Vim that allow implementing different UIs for it, instead using the default TUI. One example is Neovide. But yes, these GUIs are still limited on what Neovim can do. They cannot do multiple font sizes for example.

This guy gave LukeSmith's vibe

I'm glad you use both. IMO n/vim is good for quick edits, and emacs is a place to hang out for a while. I never could grok vimscript or lua for vim, but after following a series on emacs config from scratch I got the hang of elisp. Evil mode is just necessary!

The anti-LukeSmith: China as opposed to US City instead of a rural area Emacs instead of (Neo)Vim Video in a coffee shop instead of "Why I Won't Go to Restaurants in 2023" Hair. Long hair.

I moved from vim to emacs about 4 years ago. I've written packages for emacs, and I'm a big fan of lisps and schemes in general. But I will be the first to admit that elisp is pain and the single threaded nature of emacs is often frustrating. But that's my main gripe and it's not enough of an issue to make me consider switching away from emacs because of how engrained emacs has become in every aspect of my workflow. My overall stance has become Emacs for programming and writing, Vim for quick edits in the terminal and remote editing. Also while I think the editor wars are amusing, at the end of the day people should just use whatever tool works best for them.

Great quality of videos! Keep up the good work!

Really interesting video. Appreciate your take on it. I find that org-export on emacs is something I quite like - being able to export in md, rst, docx, etc. I haven't been using emacs for a very long time, but I find note taking to be very good within the structure that is guaranteed/forced by org-mode. I also find that I have to spend a good deal of time hacking at lisp when I want to extend it because I don't really get elisp.

I really hate these wars on whats better and whats worse, literally the worst kind of gatekeeping. Just use what you like, what you feel comfortable with and what makes use productive.

Muy choice is: emacs=note taking, neovim=code. Emacs with org roam wins against obsidian, notion, etc

What's your opinion on `vis`? It's another Vi-like editor but it's more true to the Unix philosophy. It also adds multi-cursors by taking some inspiration from the Sam editor.

I respectfully request a video on Typst. It got on my radar a while back as a longtime, avid user of both LaTeX & Md, and since you're technically light years ahead of me I would be ecstatic to hear your take on it.

I use org mode to do assignments that have a lot of mathematical content, since you can integrate LaTeX equations and symbols into it, and even compile them to images so they display in the editing buffer (this makes editing the equations a lot easier, as you can check to see if you've done it right in real time). Regarding ELISP, there's a reason all other GNU projects that use a LISP for configuration use Guile Scheme, and not the janky ELISP.

I love your thumbnail

i have taken a liking to helix.

This is the most honest comparison of emacs and vim I have ever seen. Ive veen using vim (now neovim) for 6+ years, and being a unix-loving power user, I was always interested in what emacs was, given its popularity. Most people who talk about emacs give all the positives and spend time talking about what vim doesnt do, but this was a great demonstration of everyday use and what really matters. I was planning on trying emacs out some time, but this video has made me reconsider (for now!). Unix philosphy is one of the most important things to me

i immediately knew this was gonna be a pro emacs video as soon as i saw the facial hair :D go emacs!

There's no debate. If you write any dialect of lisp, it only makes sense to use Emacs, as neither Vim nor Neovim, nor any of their distributions as far as I'm aware provide a lisp interpreter, nor the capability to evaluate s-expressions within those editors without janking it on top of them yourself. If you don't write lisps, you don't need that entire ecosystem of REPLs, scratchpads and all that jazz. You can of course bolt on top of all that pandemonium the tools you actually need, but why would you do that? It's like, I dunno, installing Manjaro or Garuda on your server just because you want to use pacman, then wasting more time on installing utils you actually need and then arguing that "what do you mean why I installed Garuda? It had pacman, I needed pacman - a pretty obvious decision", despite it including all the UI stuff you're never gonna make use of on a server, when Arch exists. I hope I expressed my opinion clearly enough.

You seem like such a chill and nice guy, not a lot of people casually film Linux videos outside on the streets of a Chinese city

I frequently redirect standard in and standard out in emacs. Not only that but with emacs shell you can pipe stuff straight from shell into a file if you wanted to look at the output in a scratch buffer you can easily do that and more. It's C-u C-| you can remap these as well.

I have used both emacs and (n)vim professionally as a programmer, and I agree. I especially like the idea of composability you touched on - neovim seems to be designed in a way that allows using other programs with it, and often this makes things way easier. Also it's pretty funny to think "eight megabytes and constantly swapping" used to be a big thing - nowadays I need to run multiple language servers in order to do my work so this truly is peanuts :D

What went wrong with treesitter + help is that you don't have the vimdoc parser installed.

You definitely forgot to mention "magit"! 😉

Hi, Andrew! I have watched all of your videos so far, and I must say they do not disappoint! Would you mind sharing what branch of IT you work in? Thanks for your videos!

You can show images with smaller scale, you don’t have to go with the original size

I started learning Vim and Emacs this year, I really like both to be honest. I used Doom Emacs a little, and that helped get my feet wet, but I'm trying to learn vanilla Emacs now. I also use Neovim a lot with Kickstart

My take on 5:31 regarding modality is many of the things listed as 'Modes' in Emacs are termed 'Options' (or something similar) in Vim. IMO it's just different terminology for the same thing. I don't think that these differences in phrasing constitute an improvement of one editor over another. Example: I see that one of the modes listed in emacs is Display-Line-Numbers. Maybe I don't understand emacs, but as far as I'm aware, that is also an option in the majority of editors, but you wouldn't necessarily be calling visual studio code a 'modal editor'. I always try and minimize bias but I do have a personal bias towards Vim as I have never fully gotten into Emacs (not for lack of trying though) and I welcome any corrections, as I know that I might be wrong on the specifics here. But this is from my viewpoint as someone who uses Vim.

I wonder if there's a holy plugin for neovim. I think a lot faster in EMACS movement commands, but neovim is improving rapidly.

People in this comment section keep saying: "It's a deepfake." I'm just happy Luke really tried Emacs this time.

2nd comment after watching the entire video: I totally agree with you on the points, and i can tell that this POV comes from someone who genuinely likes emacs as a concept but struggles to "drink the emacs koolaid" let's say where i see a lot of people just religiously (and i use this word really specifically) adhere to everything emacs does as gospel and the one true way and any resistance is blasphemous. I also love emacs for many reasons, you mention you don't care much for all the extra stuff that emacs does and i agree but for example the entire multiplexing of windows and buffers is extremely fluid and instinctive to me vs the neovim / terminal way. i understand that one can't really compare neovim to emacs in that sense but i do love it. you also mentioned the emacs discoverability ad structure of accessing all the build in f unctions directly f rom meta-x this is such a fantastic thing about emacs... once it clicks in the brain the discoverability of emacs is unparallelled. I also love the fact it's more of a "container" for everything rather than just a editor in a greater collection of independent tools where cohesive design is never really acheivable having said that, i do find that neovim sometimes "just works" and comparing it's speed and snappiness is unmatched (no matter how much emacs fanatics want to argue otherwise "AKTSHUALLY, my emacs is faster than vim on my machine you're just doing it wrong" -every emacs nerd anyways great video and channel, followed you for more tech-goodness...

As a metalhead, vi vi vi all day Dracula theme only And Thinkpads only because they're the most metal computer

And tbf, some emacs features are also available in vim if you so desire - i personally use stuff like Neorg because i prefer it as a system for note taking over obsidian as i hate having to leave the terminal. and this you can export to markdown if you need to.

What about helix in comparison to nvim?

luke smith if he was based:

Luke, how did you regrow your hair?

I really think the question is more about tmux vs emacs, or tmux+vim vs emacs. I use emacs, and it often feels all-consuming to me. Emacs creates the need to do everything within emacs. So on that aspect, tmux is a much more fair comparison. You can configure it to suit all your needs and navigate between different usecases very rapidly. You aren’t supposed to do all that inside nvim, which is for the most part just a text-editor. You might change files or compile code with nvim, but why would you even want to manage files or read man-pages, or use cli-tools with nvim? You have tmux. Here tmux can score easy points against emacs for usability. You don’t need a tmux framework to present all the possibilities: its a shell. Almost nothing is preconfigured nor needs configuring for new usecases. For me, 99% of the time I leave emacs to open a terminal is because it massively reduces the complexity of the task or problem. I imagine tmux is like that, but all of the time. I use emacs because of the many times something just works with doom emacs, and the times emacs-lisp makes the configuration enjoyable. Not leaving emacs feels great, and learning emacs-packages like magit also feels great. But it really makes no sense to say nvim can’t do those things, as you aren’t supposed to do them with a text-editor in the first place.

I feel like I understand Emacs users now. It's basically what I feel about Obsidian "Neovim is where I get my work done, Emacs is where I have my documents look nice" is exactly what I feel about obsidian, not to mention the ecosystem and the plethora of addons

There are lots of file managers for Emacs. Dired is just the one that’s baked in. But honestly, pair it with Wdired; what more could you wish for?

But take this debate seriously you can get vim emulation almost any editor, IDE including emacs. In addition, emacs can be used with modern keybinding (i.e. ergoemacs) There is no reason to argue which one is the better or worse. Use whatever you want.

We got ginger chinese luke before GTA 6. Wild.

Take your 500th like, giraffe.

excited for the typedown video

Neovim changed my life. I am more successful, better looking and when the ladies see my config file they can't resist me.

I started with Vi/Vim and I'm going to die with Vim/Neovim.

Why not both?

great video, i watched it all, will stick to vscode🤣

I want an rpg game where a gnome can randomly appear and screams EMACS EMACS EMACS EMACS EMACS

You can do all your file management with whatever you wanted if you wrote some code for it in elisp. Just take in whatever the program spits out to standard in and have emacs read it.

Do you study character strokes and radicals with Anki? Also, can you configure Emacs with Guile Scheme?

I usually use Obsidian for my note taking, and Neovim for my code editing. I'm almost considering if emacs would actually be superior to Obsidian for that task... but I will have to see. Some day. Maybe.

I have been toying with eMacs for a weeks now and love it. I have been using nvim for ~2 years. After some of these points I’m really tempted to set up org mode and tab / window management and host nvim in eMacs. Maybe set up Elisp functions that open different file types automatically in eMacs or embedded nvim. (md, Tex, org, etc in eMacs editor) and (py, rs, hs, go, sql, etc) in embedded nvim. Bind my navigation keybinds back to eMacs for handling all of that and editing bindings to whichever editor is active in the file. No need to respond but let me know what you think of this idea. Maybe you think it’s a waste of time? But I’m starting to see this as an opportunity to think less “war” and more “best of both worlds”.

Luke changed his skin to enter China

0:20 bro mews when saying shenzhen

The real debate is Vim vs NeoVim.

I dunno I spent months making a config with everything I want, it's all taped together with elisp and so are the plugins. It's fascinating but the whole thing is kind of jankedy. Sublime is practically better. If I ever get into vim at least there's a Lua based version but I don't even plan to.

This was IMHO a fair, practical comparison between the two from the perspective a seasoned professional. I would also choose nvim without a thought, for most of the usecase described in the video for Emacs nowadays is rather use Obsidian or Logseq.

why the name of orgmode is 剩女 ? lol

Luke Smith Emacs version!

I prefer the paradigm of working with my shell to do all the things pre baked into emacs, nvim is lighter and I prefer lua over elisp, the sheer quantity of parenthesis has put me off from the get go and just couldn't get past over it yet.

There is no debate. Emacs is an obvious winner.

luke smith is back before gta 6

Hello new Luke. Is there any chance you could explore the lore behind this channel ?

Treesitter started freaking out because you either need to TSInstall vimdoc, or you need to TSUpdate. Your vim helpdoc treesitter grammar is either outdated, or doesn't exist

I added a plugin for orgmode in neovim yesterday. I like emacs and just like you i want it to be the best GUI editor. But i can't always use it because 1. I'm just faster with neovim (maybe because I'm super used to it) 2. I could not det up codeium with emacs. It does not work alongside lsp So I'm sticking with neovim

I have 2000 chinese characters, with traduction-mp3-pinyin, 10000 russian words with mp3, and 10000 german words with mp3 all this in emacs headers. I need to get a life maybe

emacs have bunch of great stuff that I still prefer it over anything else but I am programmer, 90% of the times I work with coding and neovim handle that specific thing much better. I really wish emacs can change or we can have alternative tool that have those cool stuffs I miss from emacs

wow you just made a lot of people angry.... loved it.

Why do all these FOSS guys look and talk the same? It’s like they are all clones. They use similar memes and thumbnails.

have you look at asciidoc?

What is this window manager ? Hyprland ?

are u luke smith's brother??

blasphemy... And you call yourself a programmer.

When i see vim vs emacs in my feed I click. no exceptions.

how the hell do i learn emacs, im pretty good with vim but emacs feels like it will take an eternity to learn and be effective with

Why do you talk exactly like luke smith

Yes and Emacs is better in every conceivable way

I thought learning Japanese was difficult because of the Chinese characters Being in China must be hard mode, NG+

emacs in gui mode defeats the whole point, now its just shitty vscode

I love Luke Smith, and learn a lot from his video. This video reminds me of his. But I don’t mean your video is imitation, your opinion resembles mine that Vim and Emacs are not comparable. They focus on different jobs and solve their own problems. I do hope Neovim could get a better interface for users to discover its features. I know how to use Vim/Neovim starting from when I know how to search help pages with it. 最后 欢迎你来到深圳 玩得开心 注意安全！

If neovim is a katana, emacs is an SUV

LMAO 🤣 a fork of Luke Smith and Tech Outlaw.

As nano user, I enjoy the lack of war against nano.

Okay, you clickbaited me so badly.

wtf this is luke smith

slayer against metallica ..... choose - .....

Vim FTW.

I use Helix though lol.

boo this man!

Great video but i think its a bit of an unfair comparison to compare doom to a non-premade nvim distro. Many of the features to give to emacs are primarily doom and would exist in a nvim distro analog like nvchad.

W vim

this convinced me I don't have to try emacs, imma stay with my neovim