Editing non-ASCII text in Vim vs Emacs

Question

I have spent several hours reading and searching for the difference between vim and emacs as I am considering learning one of these in order to edit multiple text files written in Thai. My question is:

Given that navigation and editing are done via key stroke combinations, are either of these editors practical for editing of non-Latin files, and if so, which has the upper hand for this specific task, and why?

I would also like to batch apply search/replace regex over multiple files.

Edit: The files are all UTF-8. Some are LaTeX files, others are text files and html files. The primary editing will be of the Thai text itself. I also have a few Lao files that I will be editing as well and I see a future use for editing Greek and Khmer.

Answer 1

"Can't you just try them?" @romainl said.

2 1/2 months later the answer for vim is a resounding YES.

Extensive mapping in the vimrc file and I can navigate and edit Thai texts while in the Thai keyboard faster than I could edit in a word processor in my previous life.

The only issues with vim so far are text wrapping and single word navigation/edits. Apparently both of these could be fixed by someone kindly patching vim with ICU bindings.

I can not speak as to which has the upper hand, but only say that vim works well for this. Apparently emacs does too.

Answer 2

Emacs has extensive multilingual text editing supports, including a large library of input methods (e.g., thai-kesmanee, thai-pattachote), and tools for working with various character sets and encodings (utf-8, tis620, etc.).

Once you start Emacs, you can type C-hh to check if you have the necessary fonts installed for the desired script, and C-\ to toggle specialized input method.