VI is love, VI is life

What makes 6 so popular?

Because vii viii ix
- * laughs in Latin *

Emacs

(ducks)

I use vi from an Emacs Shell, which was spawned from an Emacs GUI.
- bro tryin' to summon a demon... /s
Emacs is what the unified linux desktop should be
Evil
- I dislike Evil, and would never recommend it to anyone looking for a modal editing solution for Emacs. I would rather break my pinky with the modifiers than use Evil.
  
  Evil is SLOOWWW: its startup time is 10x longer than other modal editing packages.
  
  It has high cost of integration with other packages; editing-related packages rarely play well with Evil unless specifically designed for it.
  
  We can do better than vi. Nowadays, there are some more modern alternatives to vi, like Kakoune that fix some of the fundamental problems with vi. One such problem is the fact that you cannot know what you are acting on until after the command completes: Kakoune solves this by having a unique noun verb syntax rather than vi's verb noun syntax. This means that you get constant feedback about what you’re acting on before you act on it, since objects are always highlighted.
  
  Instead, for anyone looking for a serious and actually good modal editing, I would suggest them to try out meow. It fixes all of the problems I mentioned above, and makes more improvements to the vi experience that I didn't mention.
Emacs
- EMACS. It’s the superior text editor.
This is the way.
link the vi command to emacs, and you'll be able to say you use vi
Emacs

It's a sound choice. I don't like to use it, personally, because I want to use something that uses same motions and syntax as editors on servers that I don't own (ex. customers). And, I'm not a fan of Lisp. It's a great and (self-)extensible text editor/lisp interpreter, though.
No

Editing excel spreadsheet? VI

here you go

Ed is the standard editor

We don't want a viditor, we want an editor. Why? Because ed is the standard!
- On the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed

Java? vi!
COBOL? vi!
SVG? Believe it or not, vi!

/s

BMP? vi and control-v!
WAV? There's probably a plugin for that!
SVG, unironically yes. There's a few times where I found a library or WYSIWYG editor making some strange choices for its SVG output, and I had to fix it manually.

Everyone at work is using Cursor these days, except for me using neovim and my emacs loving coworker. When we present during pair programming our coworkers go nuts over watching our workflows and trying to figure out if they can do similar things in Cursor lol.

What is Cursor, another AI-infested slop?
- It's a version of VSCode with deep AI integration. I'll say, it's pretty good from a workflow perspective. But I just use Avante to similar effect.
tbh they probably can, it's just more ctrl involved
- Probably!
- I'd like to see them do visual-block/rectangle selection.
Neovim and emacs are both incredibly heavy. I would rather just use something like VScodium.

Nano and Vim are small and quick.
- I would like you to open the same file in neovim, Emacs, and vscodium and see the ram usage.
  
  Matter of fact I've done this for you (230 line json):
  
  heavily customised emacs: 34 MB
  heavily customised neovim: 32 MB
  Newly installed vscodium: 300 MB+
  
  both emacs and neovim have syntax highlighting, completion, mouse support, terminal support, window management, and so on

The comments on this post went exactly like they have over the past 20 years, with one exception.

Emacs is all but forgoten.

Vim wins.

Recently, I recommended to a friend that basic vim/vi is worth learning because it's a baseline that you can always trust will be there across different Linux systems.

They asked me what I used most on my home system, and the answer was emacs, but I was very clear that I was not recommending it. It's a particular kind of person who finds themselves at home in emacs, and for everyone besides those people, selling them on emacs would feel like persuading them to do hard drugs.
- Didn't even macs have vi?
Be real fukin careful now. You’ll tear my enacs from my cold dead hands

(But yeah, I use evil-mode. Also I edit files on remote servers with vim. I’m a traitor…)
you have offended all 6 of us, prepare for retribution
I don't know, I used vim for like 6 years and then discovered, thanks to the power of evil and doom, how much better the vi experience is inside the context of emacs. With all the utilities and packages, it's worth the small additional burden of troubleshooting that it imposes.
I think there's a good reason for that. If you're not as concerned about resource consumption (Emacs used to be called "Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping", back when 8MB was a lot), then there's no reason to avoid even more complex and resource intensive IDEs. People who wanted a complex editor, but in a relatively small footprint, stuck with some variant of vi.

Thus, vi found a stable evolutionary niche. It's a tardigrade.
When people are free to choose the best editor for them, we ALL win.
- Unless it happens to be Ms word, in which case we all lose
There we are. Now all is right with the world.

What would an editor discuss be without those that support Emacs?

I noticed we even got some doom evil advocates! Lemmy truly has come off age!

(Note: as tone is hard on text: I'm genuinely pleased, and agree that the joy of Linux/Unix is it's variety. Thank you everyone)

The last one should be

SQL queries? Believe it or not vi

Yes, this is my preferred SQL client!

Ah, nice one! Didn't realize it could even be done.
- It isn't as dumb as it sounds, honestly! I used to use DBeaver and it is a fantastic project, but I really wanted Vim keybinds to construct my queries as they can sometimes be quite large. There used to be a plugin that added the functionality but it stopped working on my machine. This Vim plugin is essentially a wrapper for the CLI SQL client (psql in my case), so using it actually kind of makes sense, I think.
  
  The biggest issue I faced was exporting the results, but I just created a function in my ~/.vimrc that copies all the text of the results to a new tab and formats it however I want. CSV, HTML, JSON, XML, Markdown, whatever I need is all there and predefined. All I have to do is call :ExportToMarkdown and off I go.

VI is life

If you don't have one to begin with, sure, I guess. For everyone else, there's Nano.

Skill issue
- Vi has a shit design issue

Sorry maybe I'm dumb. But does this mean VIM and Obsidian are Vi?

Vi is actually a predecessor to Vim but many people, myself included, will alias Nvim or Vim to Vi. And I've seen people use Vi as a catch all too.
I usually refer to im as "vi" just to ~~make people think I'm old school and cool~~ save time typing that last character.

But Obsidian??
- Oh yes. My "excell isn't a database" program. Obsidian.

Nano is just better and I'll happily die on this hill

No

Nano is easier to get into, but far more limited.
- And easier to get out of…
I use nano for editing config files in the terminal. For everything else I use VSCodium. Roast me.
- You already did that yourself
OK, I can see the whites of your eyes.
It is very fast
We will die together brother...

NANO FOR LIFE

in highschool my physics teacher used vim to write stuff, like most times when checking if everyone was in class he'd just open vim and type people's name in there

Op, what do you find more offputting: emacs or neovim?

Is no one gonna talk about neovim or are we all just like set the alias and forgot that we are inside neovim and not vim or vi

Well, "vi is love" is something I always see as "masochism is related to sex".

How would you categorize masochism as not sex? :o
- Everything is sex, except sex, which is power
- Well, using vi without being forced at gunpoint.
  
  And before you accuse me of being an Emacs fanatic - nope, they exist on the same level of masochism.

Coding in Ansible?

You write Ansible playbooks to automate infrastructure management. But calling it a coding language might be a stretch it is just yaml