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Editor war is the common name for the rivalry between users of the Emacs and vi (Vim) text editors. The rivalry has become a lasting part of hacker culture and the free software community.
Contents
The Emacs vs vi debate was one of the original "holy wars" conducted on Usenet groups, with many flame wars fought between those insisting that their editor of choice is the paragon of editing perfection, and insulting the other, since at least 1985. Related battles have been fought over operating systems, programming languages, version control systems, and even source code indent style. Notably, unlike other wars (ie, UNIX vs ITS vs VMS, C vs Pascal vs Fortran), the editor war has yet to be resolved with a clear winner, and the hacker community remains split roughly 50/50.
Differences between vi and Emacs
The most important differences between vi and Emacs are presented in the following table:
Benefits of Emacs
switch-or-split-window command could switch to another window if one exists, or create one if needed. This cuts down on the number of keystrokes and commands a user must remember.Benefits of vi-like editors
Humor
Frequently, at some point in the discussion, someone will point out that ed is the standard text editor.
The Church of Emacs, formed by Emacs and the GNU Project's creator Richard Stallman, is a parody religion. 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 anathema. ("Using a free version of vi is not a sin but a penance.") The Church of Emacs has its own newsgroup, alt.religion.emacs, that has posts purporting to support this belief system.
Stallman has referred to himself as 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 (a point of extreme frustration for new users) 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). or "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) or "Eventually Munches All Computer Storage", in reference to Emacs's high system resource requirements. GNU EMACS has been expanded to "Generally Not Used, Except by Middle-Aged Computer Scientists" referencing its most ardent fans, and its declining usage among younger programmers compared to more graphically-oriented editors such as TextMate or Sublime Text. The Emacs distribution includes the full list.
As a poke at Emacs' creeping featurism, vi advocates have been known to describe Emacs as "a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor". Emacs advocates have been known to respond that the editor is actually very good, but the operating system could use improvement (referring to Emacs' famous lack of concurrency.)
A game among UNIX users, either to test the depth of an Emacs user's understanding of the editor or to poke fun at 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. A similar "game" was reportedly played among users of the old TECO editor, in which lay the roots of Emacs.
Due to the unintuitive character sequence to exit vi (":qa!"), hackers joke that there is a proposed method of creating a pseudorandom character sequence by having a user unfamiliar with vi seated in front of an open editor and asking them to exit the program.
Today
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 clones, Vim in particular, have grown in size and code complexity. These vi variants of today, as with the old lightweight Emacs variants, tend to have many of the perceived benefits and drawbacks of the opposing side. For example, Vim without any extensions requires about ten times the disk space required by vi, and recent versions of Vim can have more extensions and run slower than Emacs. In The Art of Unix Programming, Eric S. Raymond called Vim's supposed light weight when compared with Emacs "a shared myth." Moreover, with the large amounts of RAM in modern computers, both Emacs and vi are lightweight compared to large integrated development environments such as Eclipse, which tend to draw derision from Emacs and vi users alike.
Tim O'Reilly said, in 1999, that O'Reilly Media's tutorial on vi sells twice as many copies as that on Emacs (but noted that Emacs came with a free manual). Many programmers use either Emacs and vi or their various offshoots, including Linus Torvalds who uses MicroEMACS. Also in 1999, vi creator Bill Joy said that vi was "written for a world that doesn't exist anymore" and stated that Emacs was written on much more capable machines with faster displays so they could have "funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line."
In addition to Emacs and vi workalikes, pico and its free and open source clone nano and other text editors such as ne often have their own third-party advocates in the editor wars, though not to the extent of Emacs and vi.
As of 2014, both Emacs and vi can lay claim to being among the longest-lived application programs of all time, as well as being the two most commonly used text editors on Linux and Unix. Many operating systems, especially Linux and BSD derivatives, bundle multiple text editors with the operating system to cater to user demand. For example, a default installation of macOS contains Emacs, ed, nano, TextEdit, and Vim.