5.4 Vim versus Emacs use style

To a degree there is a difference of approach between Vim and Emacs. You can, of course, live on the command line and call ‘emacs foo.txt’ then edit foo.txt, then exit Emacs, and then do it again with bar.txt. But Emacs is really designed around staying inside a single instance of Emacs and visiting files and editing them, and maybe running a shell command from time to time from inside Emacs. I love Emacs, but if i’m doing quick sysadmin stuff on a command line, frankly i as often as not will just use ‘nano’ or something. In Emacs you might have a dozen buffers open at a time, some for reading mail or Usenet posts, one for a shell, one for listening to an mp3 playlist, and several buffers visiting files you are editing. Emacs is almost like a window manager for tty.

2007.2.9
Based on a Usenet post