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The hacker community has a tradition of treating their favorite text editor with a reverence bordering on religious fanaticism. Many flame wars have been fought between groups insisting that their editor of choice is the paragon of editing perfection, and deprecating the other's. 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. Most Unix 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."

1 Perceived benefits of Emacs

Emacs has a much larger set of available commands than any of the vi-like editors.
Emacs 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, thus it's vastly easier to use.

2 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 injuryRepetitive strain injury also called repetitive stress injury or typing injury is an occupational overuse syndrome affecting the tendons and nerves. It occurs when a person makes too many of the same motions over a long period of time. It is most common a, 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 PerlImage:Programming-republic-of-perl. gif|right|framed|Programming Republic of logo]] Perl also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below), is a programming language released by Larry Wall on December 18, 1987 that borrows features fr and PythonPython is an interpreted, interactive programming language created by Guido van Rossum in 1990, originally as a scripting language for Amoeba OS capable of making system calls. Python is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme, Java and Ruby. Python is develo.
There are programs for web-browsing, email, and other features that Emacs chooses to integrate; some believe that it is ok to separate tasks into different programs, especially with the advent of multitasking operating systems.

news:alt.religion.emacs
news:comp.editors (comp.editors at Google Groups)
Church of Emacs resources
Rules, Sins, Virtues, Gods and more of The Church of Emacs
Saint Ignucius — as portrayed by Richard Stallman
The Cult of vi
$EDITOR sucks-rules-o-meter measures which editor's activists are more visible on the Web

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Topics: Editor War, Perceived Benefits Of Emacs, Perceived Benefits Of...

Editor warThe hacker community has a tradition of treating their favorite text editor with a reverence bordering on religious fanaticism. Many flame wars have been fought between groups insisting that their editor of choice is the paragon of editing perfection, and	EditorEditor has four major senses: # a person who obtains or improves material for a publication; # a film editor, a person responsible for the flow of a motion picture or television program from scene to scene # a sound editor, a person responsible for the fl	Editorial cartoonistAn editorial cartoonist also known as a political cartoonist is a artist who draws cartoons that contain some level of political or social commentary. The most common outlet for political cartoonists is the editorial page of the newspaper, although there
Editorial cartoonBen Franklin was originally written for the French and Indian War, but was later recycled during the Revolutionary War An editorial cartoon also known as a political cartoon is an illustration or comic strip containing a political or social message. Edito	Editor (software)An editor is a software tool. This category includes HTML editors, text editors, source code editors, and graphics editors. More complex text-producing tools with WYSIWYG interfaces are generally referred to as word processors.	EditorialAn editorial is a statement or article by a news organization (generally a newspaper) that expresses an opinion rather than attempting to simply report news. Editorials are not written by the regular reporters; rather, they are collectively authored by a
Editor in chief	Editorial board