Does vim really have an order of magnitude more users than emacs? Is emacs really lacking in mindshare? I have no real reason to doubt those claims but I find them kind of mind-boggling. I'd have guessed they were close to parity (for the first).
I can't immediately find the survey that struck me, but here's a Quora answer [1] that cites O'Reilley selling twice as many Vim books than Emacs, the Debian PopCon results [2] that are rather striking (but Debian PopCon has quite the preselection bias, and the data may not cover all sub-packages properly), and Ubuntu's results [3] are a bit harder to parse but also striking, with vim-common at 2714181 / 25488 installs / "votes" (regular uses), vs emacsen-common (the highest-placed "emacs" package) at 330647 / 1669.
Well, I'm an emacs guy, and I've bought a vi book (O'Reilley's in fact) and not an emacs book, because I needed a book to figure out how to use vi and I didn't with emacs. Just throwing that out there.
Same here. I got Practical Vim and then moved to emacs+evil because I liked some of the vim concepts but wasn't willing to trade the usefulness of emacs. Never bought an emacs book either, after all "emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor."
C-h (+ k or m) is probably one of the first key chords you are to learn when starting emacs, from there everything is downhill.
I consider myself an emacs user but if you counted invocations I probably invoke vi significantly more frequently than emacs (I'm not going to wait for emacs to start to edit some little thing in /etc).
There are people who can program very productively in vi (I'm not one of them), so they can use vi for long and short tasks. I can program very productively in emacs but I don't consider it the right tool for quick one-off edits of something. Also vi comes with pretty much every UNIX-like base system I know of, while emacs is often off in a port system somewhere.
I too fit that description for some time. Vim is what I would use when starting an editor to do something to a file, and emacs when wanting to live in the editor and reach out to external tools like a repl for some extended time.
Using emacs in daemon mode with launchctl on osx and then making a shell alias and an automator launcher for emacsclient that just connects makes starting the new client so fast that I can use emacs for the quick jobs, too. The only thing I have to do now is get used to the emacs command equivalents for the quick edit jobs. For example, in vim I can open a file to a specific line, delete that line and then the first 5 characters of the next 50 lines, and exit the editor in just a few keystrokes, while in emacs I'd still be playing with C-h a and googling. The things I've spent the most time in emacs doing, common lisp, clojure, latex, and so on, have a very different set of common operations than the common sysadmin tasks I used vim for.
I'm primarily a windows user, but I learnt vim so that I could more easily edit files on linux servers, since it's pretty much guaranteed to be there on any box I'm on.
I don't particularly enjoy programming in vi, but I tend to do it quite a bit when making small changes to our codebase on my dev box in the sky and I don't want to deal with the overhead of starting an IDE locally.
It also stopped people from laughing at me when I ran nano. :p
Definitely not close to parity. If you search for "[programming language] emacs" and "[programming language] vim", you'll find more results for vim -- often many more -- for every language except "Lisp." (But even Lisp variants like Racket have more results for Vim.)
