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.

Editor wars are usually fought between the devotees of the two most popular editors on Unix-like systems: vi and emacs . The arguments usually focus on modern implementations of these two editors, the most popular of which are Vim and GNU emacs .