#editorwars — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #editorwars, aggregated by home.social.
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A full week after trying Gram instead of VSCode, and it's just great! Fast, no AI, and no clutter. I'm a total convert. Also, the logo is a grumpy toad, so what more could you want?
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@tarsius good thing the Enterprise.does not run on vi. They would have died many times over. #EditorWars @RikerGoogling
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The Story of vi
“I’m still using vi because I can’t escape it."
vi was created in 1976 by Bill Joy while he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. At the time most people used line based editors like ed and ex. These editors were powerful but difficult to use because you could not see the surrounding text while editing. Bill Joy wanted a full screen visual editor that would let users move around and edit interactively.
He originally wrote vi as a visual mode for the ex editor rather than as a completely separate program. When people type vi on many systems today they are actually running ex in visual mode. His goal was to make text editing faster and more intuitive on the hardware available at the time.
One important detail is the terminal Bill Joy used while developing vi. He worked on a Lear Siegler ADM 3A terminal. This keyboard had the Escape key where the Tab key is located on modern keyboards and it had no arrow keys. Because of this layout Bill Joy designed vi to rely heavily on the Escape key and the hjkl keys for movement. These design choices are still used in vi and vim today.
vi quickly became popular because it was fast and worked well over slow network connections. vi became the standard text editor on almost every Unix and Linux system. System administrators and developers learned it because it was almost always available.
vi also played a major role in starting one of the longest running debates in computing history known as the editor wars between vi and Emacs. vi users generally value speed and staying on the home row while Emacs users value its high level of customization. This rivalry has continued for decades.
Although the original vi is quite old its influence remains strong. Even today if you log into a minimal Linux server vi or vim is often the only text editor available by default.
#OpenSourceHistory #ComputingHistory #vi #vim #TechHistory #TextEditor #EditorWars #UnixHistory #linux
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«how did people start to compare emacs with vi? Indeed it is true that vi and emacs are both text editors.»
The heretics that do not use The One True Editor must understand the error of their ways.
This is as old as the hills...As someone rightly pointed out earlier in this thread, the only winning move is not to play.
But it is a somewhat expensive lesson. -
@restorante @ramin_hal9001 @hell @tusharhero
My take(s) on that #Emacs and #vim comparison part:
https://karl-voit.at/2026/01/23/Emacs-vs-vim-Cargo-Folding-Bike/
and https://karl-voit.at/2015/10/23/Emacs-is-not-just-an-editor/ -
@tusharhero thanks for the shout-out!
“people who have gone from neo/VI/m to Emacs or wise verse - what made you swap? what made you then either stay or revert?”
@hell the article mentioned by Tusharhero is a little long, so to summarize it in a way that more directly answers your question: I basically realized that Emacs was not a text editor, it was a programming language designed for text editing that came with a built-in text editor and IDE. And the built-in editor and IDE are setup so that you don’t really need to learn the Emacs Lisp programming language to use it.
I had become frustrated with my editor (Vim) my terminal multiplexer (Screen or TMux), my shell (Bash), and many of my other CLI tools all being programmed, scripted, and/or configured in different languages. For example, when trying to get my shell to notify my editor that a build process completed, I was able to program Vim and my shell scripts to both use
inotifyor similar tools to do so, but I just thought it was a little ridiculous that I had to hack together solutions to these problems.So I started thinking about ways of using the CLI with just one programming language and one runtime. Then it hit me: Emacs is exactly that: a combination of Tmux, Vim, Bash, and dozens of other tools all programmed in Lisp. Once I realized that, I decided I didn’t care how hard it was to use, it was exactly the tool I needed so I had better just learn how to use it. And it turned out not to be too hard anyways.
The best part was, I hardly ever need to write my own tools anymore because I was always able to find some Emacs Lisp code somewhere that solved practically any problem I had ever come across.
If you’d like to know more, then yeah, read my article, or ask me anything you’d like here on the fediverse!
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The `vi` editor, a staple of UNIX-like systems, was first released in 1976 as part of the BSD. What are your favorite `vi`/`vim` tricks?
I regularly use the `gq` command in vim to clean up and format text blocks.
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#Emacs vs. #vim Real World Analogy: #CargoBike Vs. #FoldingBike
https://karl-voit.at/2026/01/23/Emacs-vs-vim-Cargo-Folding-Bike/This isn't supposed to deliver fuel to the gratuitous #editorwar.
It's supposed to clear up a few things why the two tools are so fundamentally different.
HTH
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Tired of the interminable emacs vs vi editor wars (with praise for nano baked in)? Back in 2018 I wrote "ed(1) mastery is a must for a real Unix person" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/ed_mastery_is_a_must_for_real_unix_person.html - a review of @mwl 's then recent book #ed #vi #emacs #editors #unix #editorwars #standardeditor
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#EditorWars #opensource
If you have to ask for help in a forum to do something as simple as search for and paste-replace a single word with the editor you're using, you might be using the wrong editor. 😅 -
@chesheer IMO people have lost the ability to discuss topics in a non-personal fashion. Factual level vs. personal level.
Nowadays, the tendency that any discussion results in personal insults is very high.
Besides: since #Emacs is able to do everything(!) that #vim does (except vimscript) but vim can only do vim-stuff but only a tiny fraction of the stuff that's built-in or optional within Emacs, this is actually settled once and for all. 😈
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Ich hab immer noch keinen gescheiten #Editor gefunden. #fediHilfe!
Anforderungen: CLI+GUI, Multi Select (Maus), Keybindings (CUA+editable), responsive, linting, completion, light theme.
VSCodium, Atom etc.: zu lahm (Electron)
vim: zu viele weirde Modi
Emacs: Handkrampf
Helix, Zed, Tilde: brauchen LSP server
Sublime: proprietär
Geany: zu wenige Plugins, keine CLI, sonst geil
Micro: GUI suboptimal -
Right, not everyone can be enlightened enough for vi. And don't even get me started about ed, the only real editor.
Sorry, but your post wouldn't be complete without this comment :wink:
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*Vim users gotta cope
#emacs #vim #neovim #editorwars #linux -
@afreytes @blogdiva apparently Notepad++ and Geany are both based on the Scintilla editor engine, so the theoretically should be similar. But I think Geany is clearly designed more as an IDE.
For me, the most important feature of an editor is the ability to run text through a command line filter like the
awkcommand, or thejqcommand. Without this, an editor is basically useless to me, and unfortunately, there are not many text editor that make this easy to do (though Vim and Emacs fit the bill). Nano would be so much more useful if they could just add that one simple feature. Geany does have this feature but it is buried under two submenus (Edit -> Format -> Send Selection), so you have to configure your key bindings to make it easier to use.I still recommend Linux users try to allocate some of their time to learning Vim and/or Emacs, even if they don’t use these text editors day-to-day. These software are such an integral part of the Linux and Unix community, I believe it will make it much easier for you to connect with other community members if you know at least the basics of how to use these editors, especially when doing problem solving with other people.
#tech #Software #FOSS #TextEditor #EditorWars #Vim #Emacs #Nano
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@cx7 but I could say the same about #emacs too ;)
#emacs #editorwars #texteditors #operatingsystems #linux #orgmode -
Incidentally, I believe that if the arrow keys work in vim, that is a compromise for modern users. Actual vimmers use hjkl.
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@patrick fortunately or unfortunately, the Emacsian in me can relate.
#emacs #editorwars #vimsucks -
@ksaj That's an unfair comparison.
First, if you are happy with vi(m) on all sorts of hosts, you actually don't need #Emacs. That's because Emacs is so much more than just an editor: https://karl-voit.at/2015/10/23/Emacs-is-not-just-an-editor/
Second, with Emacs, you don't need it available on the host you're working on. Emacs is able to edit files on remote machines very well. 😉 (keyword here is: tramp)
So you're comparing apples and oranges.
Don't worry - stick with #vim as long as you like but if you need much, much more than just a good editor, Emacs is your friend.
I'm working with vim and Emacs in parallel on a daily basis since decades. 🙇
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Tired of the endless editor wars?
They've actually been missing the point, for all of those years.
ed(1) is the standard editor - https://nxdomain.no/~peter/ed_mastery_is_a_must_for_real_unix_person.html (or if nicer formatting trumps G's trackers, https://bsdly.blogspot.com/https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2018/04/ed1-mastery-is-must-for-real-unix-person.html) (dated 2018-04-01 :D )
#ed #unix #editors #editorwars #vi #vim #emacs #vivsemacs #emacsvsvi
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@itsfoss Thank goodness we have Emacs 😎
