Emacs vs. vi - Editor Wars
January 6, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin
I ran across a thread on Slashdot [it.slashdot.org] that linked to an article on the Register [theregister.co.uk] talking about Bill Joy, his impending retirement from Sun, and how he created the vi editor. It’s interesting that someone decided to post a thread about an article that was written almost three-and-a-half years ago. But, that’s not the point. It brought up the whole Emacs vs. vi argument.
It seems like this argument rears its ugly head every so often on Slashdot for some unknown reason. It’s well known in the UNIX and Linux circles that more often than not, developers/sys-admins/etc. either use Emacs or vi to get all their editing done in the terminal world. It’s a similar argument to whether you like the Xbox or PS2 better.
Which do I use? Well… if I had to choose, I’d choose Emacs. I tried… really, really tried to figure out vi when I was back in school, but to no avail. Even though people tried to tell me that vi was waaaay better than Emacs, I would have none of it. I turned to Emacs. For me, Emacs did the job better than vi. It just seemed more natural. I couldn’t get used to what I thought were incomprehensible control keys and no easy to find documentation with vi. So, my entire college career was Emacs-ful and I still maintain that bias.
Truth be told, though… At home, I don’t even use Emacs anymore. When I need to do some quick editing of a file from a terminal window I just use Nano. Now, Nano isn’t the greatest text editor in the world. It’s not even close. It’s a Pico clone [wikipedia], so you get all the un-robustness (is that a word?) of that type of editor. Why do I use it? It’s simple to use. There’s no hassle in learning all kind of key combinations. I just want to edit text quickly, and Nano fits the bill. This may be somewhat of a bias from using Gentoo since Nano is the default terminal editor that is installed, but it works for me.
This gets me thinking. What does make a good editing program? I use Nano from a terminal. For quick text editing in the GUI realm I usually use gedit [wikipedia] (think glorified version of Notepad). For programming, I use Eclipse. In the Windows world I’ll use TextPad [textpad.com].
For the most part, the editors I’ve chosen are fairly simple, uncluttered, and don’t require vast tomes of information to figure out how to use.
What it really comes down to, I think, is pure personal preference. The reason that there are so many different text editing programs available for so many different operating systems is because people’s preferences range so widely. Still, it seems that there’s a large contingent of developers and sys-admins that treat this as some sort of polarizing thing. Either you’re with us or you’re against us. I find the whole Emacs vs. vi debate to be amusing.
Can’t we all just get along?
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