Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. – Yogi Berra

I’ve been an Emacs fanatic for over 20 years. I’ve built and maintained some of the most popular Emacs packages, contributed to Emacs itself, and spent countless hours tweaking my configuration. Emacs isn’t just my editor – it’s my passion, and my happy place.

Over the past year, I’ve also been spending a lot of time with Vim and Neovim, relearning them from scratch and having a blast contrasting how the two communities approach similar problems. It’s been a fun and refreshing experience.

And lately, like everyone else in our industry, I’ve been playing with AI tools – Claude Code in particular – watching the impact of AI on the broader programming landscape, and pondering what it all means for the future of programming. Naturally, I keep coming back to the same question: what happens to my beloved Emacs and its “arch nemesis” Vim in this brave new world?

I think the answer is more nuanced than either “they’re doomed” or “nothing changes”. Predicting the future is obviously hard work, but it’s so fun to speculate on it.

My reasoning is that every major industry shift presents plenty of risks and opportunities for those involved in it, so I want to spend a bit of time ruminating over the risks and opportunities for Emacs and Vim.

The Risks

The IDE gravity well

VS Code is already the dominant editor by a wide margin, and it’s going to get first-class integrations with every major AI tool – Copilot (obviously), Codex, Claude, Gemini, you name it. Microsoft has every incentive to make VS Code the best possible host for AI-assisted development, and the resources to do it.

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