Sometimes both programmers just keep using their favorite editors.

At my last job, we had a more typical pairing setup with one machine (27" imac) in the middle of two programmers. When I paired with a non-Emacs user, we'd put Emacs on my half of the screen and their editor (usually Vim, occasionally Textmate) on their half.

The only caveat is that you have to make sure your editor will refresh files when they change on disk. That way, when your pair saves a file, your editor reflects the changes.

Textmate does this automatically; in Emacs, you may have to put

  (global-auto-revert-mode 1)

in your init.el, and there's some Vim setting you can tweak to get the same behavior.

The main downside is that you can only fit half as much code on the screen, but this can be mitigated by using a sufficiently large screen. In my experience, a 27" display is sufficiently large and a 24" is pretty good, but anything smaller starts to feel cramped.

It sucks. I just started a new job with lots of pair programming and all vim users. Struggle.

Quit complaining. You could have ended inside a Visual Studio shop...

See? I could be much worse.

Yeah, I use vim too. I was thinking they'd just pair off vim and Emacs people with their own kind.

We actually require Emacs at work, but that's because we're all pairing remotely over SSH and we're all lisp hackers anyway.