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Hacker Trends › vim vs emacs vs zed

vim vs emacs vs zed on Hacker News

Across 2007–2026 of Hacker News, emacs leads vim vs emacs vs zed with 83,389 mentions to vim’s 74,187, peaking in Nov 2022.

Mention-over-time for vim vs emacs vs zed, overlaid across 2007–2026 of Hacker News. Each line is a live date-histogram over ~45M posts and comments, computed with Upstash Redis Search.

vim74,187 mentions, peak Jul 2023emacs83,389 mentions, peak Nov 2022zed9,856 mentions, peak Apr 2026
2008201120142017202020232026
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How the lead changed hands

The editor wars, old guard vs new: Vim and Emacs trade the modal-vs-extensible argument year after year, then Zed bursts in and spikes hard across 2024–26.

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