>>18389 (OP)
It seems like the conflict between vim and emacs is mostly over, as people care about other stuff. Still, it seems to be that it had two parts:
>controls
Vim is definitely better than emacs by default, because it's a modal editor so you don't need to rely on modifier keys even for the most basic of basic operations (other than typing text), and most key presses are named to work as abbreviations, so you don't need to rack your brain to remember that you can replace a word by pressing c then w, as that is short for change word. But then emacs can be turned into a modal editor, the evil package copies vim's behaviour rather well. I've been using xah-fly-keys for a few weeks, and it's not as straightforward as vim's at first, but I like it so far. Still, back in the 1990s and 2000s there weren't all these nice packages that you could download, so most people just tried out both emacs and vim, preferred one over the other, and clashed over this with others.
>the programs themselves
Vi started life as a program built over ed, and you should really look up that and even try it out to see what it's like to edit text via the command line when you really only have access to a single line. Although it should be noted that back then most people would have used teletypewriters, so you could just print the whole text once and use that hard copy as a reference. Still, it was made at a time of limited resources and ”primitive” input-output devices, so the program had to be simple, fast and efficient.
Emacs is ultimately meant to be an interface to a computer, as it's written in LISP by people who were fucking around with expensive LISP machines back in the 80s. The interface might be text based, but calling it a text editor is like referring to a laptop as a typewriter: sure, you can type out whatever you want to write, and with a printer you can even commit it to paper, but if you really just need to put a few letters on a piece of paper, then a typewriter is a much simpler solution. And this is why emacs comes with a lot of ”bloat” such as a web browser and a bunch of games even in a default installation: it's pretty much the user facing half of an operating system that for some dog forsaken reason is called a text editor by the very people who develop it. It can be a great thing if you get into it, but if you only need to edit a random config file on a computer once in a blue moon then it's definitely overkill.