Vim vs Emacs for fast text editing

I used vim for 2 years and got it into my muscle memory before my Emacs curiosity led me to try out GNU Emacs in the spring of 2022. Many people say vim is the faster text editor, but Emacs is wonderfully extensible. After having used both, I don't think vim is faster than Emacs, so I am going to show how many consecutive key presses you need to accomplish some common tasks in both and compare. Of course, you can use evil-mode in Emacs and edit text the vim way, but I am comparing the usual non-evil default keybindings of Emacs with the defaults in vim. There is also the common halftruth about crazy key chords in Emacs contra simple one-key presses in vim. This is true for many workflows, but not so much for actual text editing. For text editing, the keyboard shortcuts in Emacs are usually just a modifier key plus an alphanumeric key.

I believe that pressing two keys at once takes the same amount of time as pressing one key. I call both "a keypress". On the other hand, pressing three keys consecutively takes three times longer than pressing three keys at once because you have to depress one key, lift up your finger, then depress the next key, lift your finger and then depress the next key and lift your finger. Therefore the actual speed of editing is determined by the number of consecutive keypresses to get something done, not the total number of keys depressed. As an example, I often press C-c C-, s (Ctrl-C Ctrl-, s) to insert a code block in org mode which is three consecutive key presses and a total of four keys (I hold Ctrl down from the time I start pressing c until I have finished pressing ,). This could have been faster if it involved fewer consecutive keypresses even with the same amount of totalt keys, like for instance the keypress C-M-S-, (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-,) which is just one keypress, but also four total keys. My point is that when thinking about the speed of editing, it is the number of consecutive keypresses that matter, not how many keys you press at once (although fewer is less akward for the hand).

In this blog post, I will use Emacs symbols for keybindings in Emacs where C = Ctrl, M = Meta (Alt or press and release Esc), S = Shift and s = super (Windows/Tux/Purism/Apple Commmand Key/…). Emacs keybindings are generally written with a dash when pressed together and with a space in between when consecutive, for instance M-b C-p means Alt and b pressed at the same time and then Ctrl and p pressed at the same time. When the same modifier key is used for two consecutive key presses, it does not have to be released like the example above with C-c C-, s shows. When writing about Vim, I will use Esc for Escape and use no space between consecutive keypresses which is the usual vim way, for exampel 2gj for the three consecutive keypresses 2, g and j. All other glyphs just represent themselves.

Before starting to write anything in vim, you have to press i (or a or o etc). In Emacs, you just start writing. That's one keypress for vim and zero for Emacs. After you have written a sentence, maybe you want to move back and do an edit. Let's say you want to move to the start of the sentence you just wrote and add something in front of the first sentence. In vim you would press Esc to get to normal mode and then 0 to move to the start of the line (not necessarily the line you see on screen, but the start of the chunk of text since the last newline character) and then you would have to press i. In Emacs, you would press C-a (or M-a if the sentence is longer than one visual line) and start to write. In vim, you would need three consecutive key presses and in Emacs one before you started to write your new first sentence. After you have written your new sentence, maybe you want to go to the end of your paragraph and add something. In vim, you would press Esc, then A and then start to write. In Emacs, you would press C-} and then start to write. Again, vim has two consecutive keypresses and Emacs has one before writing.

Maybe we want to move two visual lines up and correct the misspelling of the word "icnonsequently" next. The word is two visual lines up, but starts four columns (four letters) to the left of where we are now. In vim, you would press Esc to get to normal mode, then 2gk (that is not one keypress, but three consecutive key presses) and then 3h (two key presses), then d, l, i and c, which is 1 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 10 consecutive key presses. In Emacs, you would press C-2 C-p (or C-p C-p) (two consecutive key presses to move up two visual lines since Emacs works on those), then C-2 C-b, then C-t (to use the function transpose chars with the cursor at the third letter), ie 5 consecutive key presses.

I could probably think of more examples, but the point is that for most edits, Emacs demands fewer consecutive key presses than vim. You can check out Emacs Rocks' episode 3 and 4 where Emacs is faster than vim for a couple of Vim golf tasks. Protesilaos Stavrou has also made a video where he shows off Emacs Macros for solving Vim Golf tasks. I think most of these are faster than vim as well. There are probably more examples floating around the internet if you care to find them.

The reason why we get more consecutive key presses and spend more time to get from one point to another and start writing in vim is because of the modal editing. Since we constantly have to hit Esc to get to normal mode before moving around and then hit a, o, i, r, c, A, O, C or I before actually getting to start typing our text, we generally need two or at least one (when combining movement and getting into insert mode like with A) more consecutive keypresses for moving around and starting to write in vim than in Emacs. There are also more functions in Emacs for editing text, many of which are bound to simple key combos like the function transpose-chars that we used above which further saves keypresses compared to manually deleting a character, moving and then adding the same carachter one letter later in the word. Even if you count the total number of keys depressed and disregard that it is faster to press two keys at once than to press the same two keys after each other, Emacs usually ends up with fewer total number of keys pressed for doing the same edits.

Modal editing, as shown above, is slower since you have to go in and out of modes. In addition, it is very unlike any workflow most of us have ever used before, which means that it takes more time to learn text editing in vim than to learn text editing in Emacs. As someone who has spent time learning both vim and Emacs, I found it a much steeper learning curve to learn vim for text editing. Emacs can also do everything else, so you can continue to learn Emacs after your muscle memory has adjusted to its text editing workflow and that is the reason why many people think Emacs is hard to learn, but for text editing, it is actually much easier to learn than vim since the way you edit text in Emacs is less weird.

Both vim and Emacs have good tutorials that you should spend some time with when trying them out for the first time, but for vim, I felt like I had to go back to the tutorial a lot of times before I really mastered the concepts of modal editing. When I finally made my own vim cheat sheet for my Norwegian keyboard layout and hung it on the wall underneath my screen, I finally started to get its keyboard shortcuts into my muscle memory. (I published that cheat sheet here, but realized I did not actually have the right to base my sheet on the model I used since it was not published under a free culture license, so I had to remove it.) With Emacs, I felt that the text editing keyboard shortcuts were more intuitive and easier to learn and remember, although I have made a cheat sheet that I plan to laminate soon and hang where my vim cheat sheet used to hang before.

The myth that Emacs is good at anything except text editing is a myth, not a fact. It is a slightly faster text editor than vim and it is much easier to learn to edit text in because you do not have to grasp the concept of modal editing. Even so, how many key presses you need to get things done and how much time it takes might be less important to you than other factors when you choose your text editor, especially since most time is probably spent thinking. How inspired you feel by the software might be more important to you than the speed of editing. Maybe you prefer to separate different functionality into different programs and configure all of them to use vim binding or maybe you like to integrate them all into a hypermoldable, super-hackable Emacs Lisp interpreter. Or maybe it is important for you to use the same software as your colleagues, friends or fellow students to be able to share their workflow tweaks and take part in a shared culture?

I think both (Neo)vim and Emacs are good choices for investing some time into learning since they both have strong communities that will make sure they will be around for fitfy years more (unlike some editors, both FOSS and non-free, that are developed by companies or individuals without communtiy participation and may be abondoned at any time, like Atom exemplified recently). Both editors demand a bit of configuration which is a slightly different approach than many of the newer editors that are more ready out of the box experiences, but might not be as flexible to adjust to your workflow (as opposed to you adjusting to theirs). In the end, you choose the tools that work the best for you. Just don't lie and say you use vim because it is faster when you haven't even given Emacs the chance to convince you otherwise.