In the beginning…
In the beginning, there was ed.
Ed is the standard text editor.
Then there was vi, and it was good.
Then came emacs, and disharmony.
-Extract from intro to Word War vi
In 1976 one man changed the face of text editors. That man is Bill Joy who developed vi for BSD UNIX. To those who are a bit unfamiliar with command line UNIX/Linux, vi (short for Visual) is a screen-oriented text editor that operates in two modes: insert mode and normal mode. Please reference here for a deeper explanation of its design and implementation.
I was first introduced to vi when I started working with FreeBSD back in 2001 and continued to work on it when I started to play around with Red Hat Linux 7.3 in 2002. Once I started to understand and get more comfortable with vi, there was no turning back. Seriously! All those vi/emacs fanatics out there know exactly what I mean. Even in a Microsoft Windows environment I have to install Cygwin to get all of my much needed tools, which includes vi.
Today I utilize vim (Visual IMproved) but when I think about it, it constantly throws me back to what has been dubbed “the Editor War.” It was after vi that emacs came rich with its own features and functionality and then a “holy war” broke out. You were either on the side of vi or the side of emacs.
Just recently I had to go on-site to the campus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and when speaking with an applications development manager who knew I was extremely comfortable with POSIX-like platforms and architectures, he had asked me, “Emacs or Vi?” I simply replied, “Vi and grep, all the way.” He had a look of brief disappointment as he turned to a colleague of his next to him. She commented how she was on my side. That look of disappointment quickly turned to a look of betrayal. That passion still courses through the veins of many.
Now I ask you, which text editor would you prefer? Vi, Emacs, or other? And do you still feel the war in your daily life?
