Vim has always adhered to its “Do one thing, and do it well” philosophy, cementing its role as a highly focused text editor. Meanwhile, contemporary workflows for development and documentation now demand more than just text editing, incorporating tasks like knowledge structuring, document generation, and various development aids. Consequently, there are growing use cases where Vim by itself falls short.
This session re-examines Vim’s foundational design principles (with a focus on design-notes.txt) to propose a strategy of using it in a structurally complementary way with a self-contained environment like Emacs. Instead of simply wielding two tools, I will present an operational architecture that clearly separates their roles: “Vim as a high-velocity editor” and “Emacs as an environment for documentation and knowledge management.”