Emacs and vi are both overrated.

no way. I live in emacs.

And without vi my job would be 1000 times harder.

What is your job? Text janitor?

Why does vi make your job 1000 eaier than, say, using pico, or joe or any of the millions of other editors out there?

Also, are you discounting the learning curve?

because vi is installed on just about every unix box in the world. I have __never__ had a problem with vi not being there.

(I hate vi btw but I like it being there for me)

I am discounting the learning curve. Learning things is mostly easy. Except see my monad complaints

oh. and I'm a hacker by trade.

I write lots and lots of code.

I write lots and lots of text.

I have to fix crazy stuff in crazy ways mainly on unix boxes. Some of the things I have done would turn the hair white of any sensible administrator.

Okay, I give extra points for ubiquitousness. But your argument for vi boils down to that. What do you like so much about Emacs? How long you have to wait for it to load?

Emacs is just the most powerful, extensible, text processing system ever invented. I help maintain it.

I use a laptop with hibernate so no time at all.

When I do have to load it I don't wait longer than 10seconds which is a lot less time than firefox, say.

Are you using a commodore 64?

Yeah, extensible if you like to fuck around with ((((lisp)))) all day.

Yes, I am using a commodore 64.

I like the fact that if I want to embed a block of lines (say 30 through 60 in printf statements I can do the following in vi's command mode.

:30,60s/.*/printf("&")/g

And if I want to insert the output of a command into vi, I can do:

:r !stdfuncblock foo

Of course, I think emacs is pretty powerful too, but I cut my UNIX teeth on vi and my LISP isn't strong enough.

I'm with Mishca and nic on vi.

Yes, vi has a brutal learning curve.
However, vi is *everywhere*. vi works on any terminal emulation through any connection. It is always the same on every machine in the world.
vi manages the highest power/expressiveness ratio of any editor I know. (You can do amazing things with little tiny bizarrely cryptic commands).

I have 3 problems with emacs. (1) It's not everywhere. (2) I already know vi. (3) It sucks. EAT FLAMING DEATH, EMACS USING SCUM!

(Sorry, I couldn't let my comment be totally rational -- this is a religious war after all).

I text editor should be intuitive. vi's manual is well over 100 pages, and none of it intuitive.

True, of course, you don't have to learn lambda calculus to unleash the full power of vi, either, do you?

both are underated/underappreciated by people in the opposite camp.

ididak: that doesn't mean they can't be overrated, as well.

Jay: if that's true, then it means you can't get vi to do all the things for you that you can get emacs to do. (Such as solve the Tower of Hanoi problem, for instance. Which I have to do all the time, of course, because I'm a programmer for these Tibetan monks, and when they have a glitch...) ... anyway, it sounds to me like an admission that vi is not as powerful.