Hacker Trends
how it worksopen the tool →

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 81,784 mentions to vim’s 73,110, peaking in Dec 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.

vim73,110 mentions, peak Aug 2023emacs81,784 mentions, peak Dec 2022zed9,244 mentions, peak Apr 2026
2008201120142017202020232026
Open this comparison in the interactive tool - zoom to any date range and read the stories behind each spike →

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.

The stories behind each line

Top vim stories
  1. How to Exit Vim 1,111 points · 2020
  2. Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim 775 points · 2017
  3. How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim 703 points · 2019
  4. Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster 667 points · 2021
Top emacs stories
  1. Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers 1,063 points · 2023
  2. Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs 782 points · 2025
  3. Buttery Smooth Emacs 651 points · 2016
  4. New GNU Emacs website 547 points · 2016
Top zed stories
  1. Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source 1,576 points · 2024
  2. Zed on Linux Is Here 923 points · 2024
  3. Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor 747 points · 2025
  4. Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed 683 points · 2025

Each term on its own

More comparisons

Build your own comparison on the main chart, or read how Hacker Trends works.