Editor war

The editor war is an ongoing debate about which text editor is best. The two largest camps are those favoring vi and those favoring Emacs.

The hacker community has a tradition of treating their favored piece of software with a reverence bordering on religious fanaticism, and few pieces of software are more universal than text editors. Many flame wars have been fought between groups insisting that their editor of choice is the paragon of editing perfection, and insulting the others. Most participants in these arguments recognize that it is (mostly) tongue-in-cheek. There are related wars over operating systems and programming languages, all the way down to such 'trivial' things as source code indent style.

Editor wars are usually fought between the devotees of Emacs and vi, the two most popular editors on Unix and Unix-like operating systems. Most *nix users and programmers use one or the other of these editors. Many are familiar with both, at least enough to get around, and so feel they are well-placed to make judgment calls as to which is "better".

Frequently at some point in the discussion, someone will point out that ed is the standard text editor.

The Church of Emacs has been formed by Emacs users, to worship Emacs and discourage the use of vi. It has its own newsgroup, alt.religion.emacs. Richard Stallman has jokingly declared himself to be St IGNUcius, a Saint in the Church of Emacs.

vi lovers have created an opposing Cult of vi, which some Emacs users call, "Clearly a miserable attempt to ape their betters."

Perceived benefits of Emacs

• Emacs has a much larger set of available commands than any of the vi-like editors.
• Emacs is scriptable in a variant of LISP and has many plug-ins such as the gnus newsreader and various software development tools.
• Emacs includes vi, in the form of viper-mode. (Note that vi is not vim. Emacs does not include vim.)
• Emacs doesn't require switching between "command" and "input" mode.
• GNU EMACS can perform computations with some calendars, such as Mayan or Discordian, which are not supported by the vi-like editors.

Perceived benefits of vi-like editors

• vi commands are entered largely without the use of modifier keys such as Ctrl or Meta. Some users find this reduces wrist strain (see repetitive strain injury, quadruple bucky cokebottle).
• vi is smaller and faster than Emacs. See feature creep.
• vi's presence is guaranteed as part of the POSIX standard.
• Vim, a popular vi-like editor, is scriptable in commonly-used languages such as Perl and Python.
• vi works better with really dumb terminals; while this is not as important as it used to be, sometimes this ability is still a factor, such as when system problems have reached the point where the GUI cannot be started, so one has only a severely-limited console environment.
• The default key bindings of EMACS conflict with some telnet implementations.

External links

• news:alt.religion.emacs
• news:comp.editors (comp.editors at Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/groups?q=comp.editors&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search))
• Church of Emacs resources (http://www.dina.dk/~abraham/religion/)
• Rules, Sins, Virtues, Gods and more of The Church of Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gospel.html)
• Saint Ignucius (http://stallman.org/saint.html) — as portrayed by Richard Stallman
• The Cult of vi (http://www.splange.freeserve.co.uk/misc/vi.html)
• $EDITOR sucks-rules-o-meter (http://www.tarunz.org/~vassilii/srom/) measures which editor's activists are more visible on the Web
• Hackles - Strip Archives 2004 (http://hackles.org/archives-2001.html)
  • Hackles unwittingly starts a text editor holy war. (http://hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=92)
  • The text editor holy war continues: What does Katrina use? (http://hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=93)
  • The text editor holy war continues: Marcus doesn't get it. (http://hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=94)pl:Wojny edytorowe