Editor war

Editor war is the common name for the rivalry between users of the vi and Emacs text editors. The rivalry has become a lasting part of hacker culture and the free software community.

Many flame wars have been fought between groups insisting that their editor of choice is the paragon of editing perfection, and insulting the others. Unlike the related battles over operating systems, programming languages, and even source code indent style, choice of editor usually only affects oneself.

Differences between vi and Emacs

The most important differences between vi and Emacs are presented in the following table:

	vi	Emacs
Keystroke execution	vi editing retains each permutation of typed keys. This creates a path in the decision tree which unambiguously identifies any command.	Emacs commands are a combination of typed keys executed immediately, which leaves the user with the choice of whether or not to use a command.
Memory usage and customizability	Historically, vi is a smaller and faster program, with a more limited capacity for customization.	Emacs takes longer to start up and requires more memory. However, it is highly customizable and includes a large number of bells and whistles, as it is essentially an execution environment for a Lisp program designed for text-editing.
User environment	vi was exclusively used inside of a text-mode console, offering no graphical user interface (GUI).	Emacs, while initially designed for use on a console, grew a GUI fairly early on. Modern versions of both provide various GUIs.
Function/navigation interface	vi uses distinct editing modes.	Emacs uses metakey chords.

Benefits of vi-like editors

• Follows a "composition of simple tools" philosophy.
• Small in size and compatible with the Unix philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well". Avoids featuritis.
• Faster than Emacs (historically at least).
• Runs on all systems that can implement the standard C library, including UNIX, Linux, DOS, Windows, Mac, BeOS, and POSIX-compliant systems.
• Allows users of the QWERTY keyboard to keep their fingers on the home row, thus requiring less movement to edit.
• Ubiquitous. Essentially all Unix and Unix-like systems come with vi (or a variant) built-in.

Benefits of Emacs

• "Kitchen sink" philosophy.
• Larger set of features than vi.
• One of the most ported non-trivial computer programs. It runs on a wide variety of operating systems, including most Unix-like systems (GNU/Linux, the various BSDs, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, Mac OS X, etc.), MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows and OpenVMS. Unix systems, both free and proprietary, frequently provide Emacs bundled with the operating system.
• Extensible and customizable (Lisp programming language variant - Emacs Lisp), with features that include:
  • Special editing modes for a large number of programming, markup, typesetting languages (Bash, C, Delphi, Java, Lisp, LaTeX, MediaWiki, Python ...).
  • Ability to emulate vi (known as "viper-mode").
  • A powerful and extensible file manager (dired), integrated debugger, and a large set of tools to work with.

Humor

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

File:Richard Stallman by Anders Brenna 03.jpg

Richard Stallman appearing as St IGNU−cius, a saint in the Church of Emacs.

The Church of Emacs, formed by Richard Stallman, is a joke, and while it refers to vi as the "editor of the beast" (vi-vi-vi being 6-6-6 in Roman numerals), it does not oppose the use of vi; rather, it calls proprietary software an anathema. ("Using a free version of vi is not a sin but a penance.") It has its own newsgroup, alt.religion.emacs, that has posts purporting to support this parody religion.

Stallman has jokingly declared himself to be St IGNU−cius, a saint in the Church of Emacs.

Supporters of vi have created an opposing Cult of vi, argued by the more hardline Emacs users to be an attempt to "ape their betters".

Regarding vi's modal nature, some Emacs users joke that vi has two modes – "beep repeatedly" and "break everything". vi users enjoy joking that Emacs's key-sequences induce carpal tunnel syndrome, or mentioning one of many satirical expansions of the acronym EMACS, such as "Escape Meta Alt Control Shift" (a jab at Emacs's reliance on modifier keys). Others have posited that this acronym in fact means "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" (in a time when that was a great amount of memory) or "EMACS Makes Any Computer Slow" (a recursive acronym like those Stallman uses), in reference to Emacs's high system resource requirements.

As a poke at Emacs’ creeping featurism, vi advocates will describe Emacs as “a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor”.

A game among UNIX users either to test the depth of an Emacs user's understanding of the editor or to poke fun of the complexity of Emacs involved predicting what would happen if a user held down a modifier key (such as Control or Alt) and typed their own name.

Word War vi is a humorous Defender-like shoot 'em up based on the editor war.

Current state of the editor war

In the past, many small editors modeled after or derived from vi flourished. This was due to the importance of conserving memory with the comparatively minuscule amount available at the time. As computers have become more powerful, many vi-alikes, Vim in particular, have grown in size and code complexity. These vi variants of today, as with the old light Emacs variants, tend to have many of the perceived benefits and drawbacks of the opposing side. Namely, recent versions of Vim can have more extensions and run slower than past versions of Emacs. Moreover, with the large amounts of RAM in modern computers, both vi and Emacs are lightweight compared to large IDEs such as Eclipse, which tend to draw derision from both vi and Emacs users alike.

O'Reilly says that its tutorial on Vim sells twice as many copies as that on Emacs. Many advanced programmers use either Emacs and Vim or their various offshoots, including Linus Torvalds who uses MicroEMACS.

In addition to vi and emacs workalikes, pico and its free and open source clone nano and other editors often have their own third-party advocates in the editor wars, though not to the extent of vi and emacs.

References

• The Art of Unix Programming: Raymond, Eric S (2003). The Art of UNIX Programming. ISBN 0-13-142901-9. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/. 

External links

• Emacs Wiki, community site dedicated to documenting and discussing Emacs
• Church of Emacs resources
• Rules, Sins, Virtues, Gods and more of The Church of Emacs
• Saint Ignucius — as portrayed by Richard Stallman
• Vi Lovers Home Page
• $EDITOR sucks-rules-o-meter measures which editor's activists are more visible on the Web
• Ed is the standard text editor
• A transcript of Richard introducing St. IGNUcias and the Church of Emacs