What is to Vim as Lisps are to Emacs?

Question

I have about 15 Emacs years behind me and picked up Vim about a year ago. Currently I am more or less equally efficient in both (as far as editing is concerned) and love both. Now the lisp hacking experience in Emacs is something extraordinary; everything just meshes together. What language (including its community etc.) would relate to Vim as lisps relate to Emacs?

Answer 1

While vimscript is indeed the primary extension language for vim recent versions support Ruby, Perl and Python extensions as well.

To answer the actual question - vim is immensely popular with Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby developers. I know quite of lot of those and next to none are using Emacs for various reasons. This is, of course, reflected in the supported extension languages I noted earlier.

Lisp is not Emacs's only stronghold IMHO - it has fantastic C/C++, Haskell, Perl, JavaScript, Scala, XML, etc. Ruby's own creator is using Emacs for both C and Ruby hacking. I personally use Emacs for everything :-)

Answer 2

Vim has its own language, called vimscript. Most plug-ins as well as some core features are written in vimscript.

Answer 3

As bitmask said, Vim has its own extension language called Vimscript / VimL. A lot of plugins are written in Vimscript, with Python jumping on that market as well, nowadays.

Apart from that, Perl community has always been fond of Vi / Vim; it fits their philosophy of "small quick to write programs".