The War Of The Editors
The war between the vi and emacs text editors has ranged on for years, taking many lives as the warring parties have fought over features, stability and fictional definitions of the respective acronyms. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge take an in-depth, investigative look at the issue and explore whether the war is still important or not…
Remember we are just the start of the conversation! What do you think? Does it really matter whether vi or emacs is better? Is the tension between vi and emacs users bad for Open Source? Does the debate even matter now with graphical text editors such as GEdit in the race? Share your thoughts in the shot comments below…
59 Comments to “The War Of The Editors”
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I like both of the editors a lot, and I was really disappointed when it wasn’t even discussed why vi and emacs are great editors, because they both are, I use vim because it fits my mind and hands the most, but I can easily see why people prefer emacs. Why not actually discuss things instead of just leaving this theme that is actually really good without any discussion? :/
Well you guys have a good point there.. but as always I disagree. I think “it does matter!”. It absolutely freaking does matter and I think what’s even more important than that is the fact that it matters for everyone. It actually matters so much that everything else is absolutely insignificant by comparison. So yeah … text editors matter. They always did and always will. Not even that but they will matter even more in the future. With the advent of new editors and the ever changing market it’s only a matter of time until we see a complete revolution sparked by the next generation of text editors.
So thanks for the great shot guys.. although a bit misinformed.
cheers.
Well some people actually almost live in their text editors, and use them more than the os itself, so I think that it actually matters, not as a vi vs emacs thing, but how we can help it forward, I think the whole editor war is more or less just a snowball war, a playfight. But still, compared to the new “fancy” editors, vi and emacs actually do a better job, sad to see that we haven’t really seen a great boon of new thoughts here.
So, who listened to the whole shot?
I’m not a big editor user. I use Kate when I need one. Have used Nano when connecting to remote systems. I think I’ve used vi and emacs when there was no other option. I think there was a version of emacs on the Amiga.
I’d be interested in what sort of things editor ‘power-users’ do.
Usually I’m writing, but I love the keyboard control, how I can move around the files without using my mouse, that I can use different scripts on my files to make it easier to get what I want to be done done, That I can have my editor pop up a wiki, where I can note down things that I want to remember. That I can zip around using macros to change things that would take a long time in other editors, that is the sort of things that I love with both the editors.
There are a lot of good answers to this question on stack overflow:
Happy reading.
You’re right, it doesn’t matter.
I only use vi(m) if I have no other choice because I’m making a quick configuration change on a headless server. I only know about three vim commands.
The only time I use GEdit is if I’m making some quick notes or writing some simple code for a project which hasn’t yet progressed to the point where I’m using an IDE like Eclipse or a rich text editor like Google Docs or a content manager like Drupal.
I’ve never even used emacs, though I’ve heard that OS comes with a text editor these days.
In short, apart from satisfying a subset of (masochistic) programmers I see text editors as a convenience utility on a par with a calculator rather than something I spend a lot of time in.
Argument from ignorance = I don’t like it, and therefore it doesn’t matter. That is what you just did.
P.S. How do you set an avatar/profile picture on shotofjaq.org? It’s WordPress right?
I think they use gravatars, as far as I know.
See http://shotofjaq.org/discuss/ (the Discuss link at the top) for exactly how to do this.
I reckon you should change from gravatar to http://unicornify.appspot.com/use-it
Can we expect more such debates this time next year, you’d only have to re-record the first 30 seconds (and have Aq say something other than gEdit occasionally). We could have
Any other suggestions?
What a waste of 11 minutes.
April fools’, fool
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Well, I would continue, but I have to waste another 10 mins, Trying to pick up women.
If you had written it in vim it would have taken 20 sec
Doesn’t matter, Stuart? But hidden messages in support of gedit?
I hate April Fool’s day, but I literally LOL’ed. Well done.
The best part of this is that they probably spent less time creating this than we all spent listening to it
Happy April 1st.
~Scott
No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No! No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No! No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No! No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No! No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No! No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No! No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No! No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No! No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No! No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No! No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No! No no no no no no. Oh for the love of…NO! Are you bloody stupid? No!
Gah, April Fooled.
No it doesn’t. And yes I use vi and Kate. But can you say the same thing about IDEs? Hmm?
n…..
Oh, that point might be covered already.
I know this is a joke, but I would like to thank you for expressing exactly my sentiment regarding vi vs emacs, gnome vs kde, perl vs python, … If anything, it could have been a bit longer.
Well, I’m too late for the no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no …
You see, being stuck in the car listening 9 minutes of “no no no no fucking no” is absolutely horrible (I had no way to get to the ipod at that time…). Good show guys!
I’ve still got the episode playing in the background. I think I know where it’s going. Hehe.
The editor war is generally healthy competition for open source, but a lot of people take it far too seriously. The important thing is people choose the right tool for the job.
I personally prefer EMACS, because I find VI gets in my way a lot. At work, I do a lot of Python development using WingIDE which is almost perfect except it’s proprietary software so I don’t use it at home. If I’m modifying config files on a server, nano is my lightweight editor of choice.
Used Emacs back in the 1980s and its best left there with shoulder pads, turnups and mullets. For those who prefer antiquities why not use a port of Edlin from MS-D(r)OSS?
A quill pen would be nice. But can it us Gel ink?
so you mean that we shouldn’t use cars anymore because that is an idea/technology that has been worked on for so long. Or modern medicine for that sake… well let’s just throw out pasteurization, that was something they were doing in the 70s…
Cars? Well, would you still drive around in an Austin Maxi? An old Mini Clubman (like my old mum’s) or the latest offerings? I rest my case.
You are talking like noone have been working on emacs and vim the last 30 years, go check your facts before you go around making false analogies…
I’m not saying that no-one’s using these editors. I’m saying that I’m not using it. I used Emacs for a long time so I’ve been there, used it, loved it at the time and left it for something else. In favour of Emacs though, there are some specialist things that it does that I miss but not so much that I (personally) would seriously think of using it again.
It was an interesting shitcast…I sat down there with 11 minutes of “no, no”…Now I will have to be more careful with ShotofJack before taking a dump!!! Hahahahahaha!!!
Very annoying April fools joke – but still better than listening to Linux people telling how amazing Apple is (as in your last and so far worst shot).
That is something that I am really really agreeing with, it was a lot better, this one was at least factional
hope the one on caffeine is going to be a good one too 
How were we saying how amazing Apple is? We were just discussing whether they will bring out a console.
Also, I am not afraid to say that they are amazing at some things. Just because they are non-free doesn’t mean that they have an ability to release beautifully designed products that their customers love. Apple Free Software Ethics = shit, Apple Product Design Skills – incredible.
You are not directly saying how amazing Apple is – but discussing something hypothetical in over 10 minutes shows an amount of interest into a company that is hyped enough by its own fans (and mainstream media) already. All I know is that if they will develop a games console everyone will jump on it and all media will pretend that this iPlaywithmyself thing is the first game console ever.
Maybe I am a bit too harsh – of course you can discuss whatever you like and I will still end up listening to it. It just doesn’t interest me at all what Steve J. thinks of in Cupertino.
Besides that: I agree with you and couldn’t care less what editor people use!
So…you’re broadly of the opinion that any discussion of Apple at all which contains anything positive is a bad thing?
Not that either – guess I’m just annoyed of all the discussions that hype Apple to the extreme (like all the normally tech-uninterested media dedicating whole pages to how incredibly cool this “iSlate” will be before anyone knew anything about it).
I like Macbooks and have to admit that iPhones are quite cool, but we should stop pretending that Apple invented all that stuff.
And I should stop derailing these threats… In any case: great show, keep it going!
Wow, the comments are particularly negative for this shot. Apparently some people either don’t have a sense of humour or are simply power-nerds unable to let go for April Fool’s Day.
Thank god for the search slider.Saved myself 8 or 9 minutes of Johnonono and a Shit off Joke.
I listened to about two minutes before jumping to the end. Nice April Fool’s guys
I started learning emacs a long time ago, but switched to vi when I took a Linux sysadmin class and the instructor assumed and insisted that we all use it. I only use vi for very quick and simple edits now though; I prefer BBEdit on my Mac for anything significant. I’m not a professional geek anymore so I don’t really have to care.
I crawled out of bed and turned on my computer to type this. If this “no” (+ “Yes, use gedit”) goes on for a whole 10 minutes… then: -fuck- you. ….That is all. Goodnight.
I recently starting looking into Vim, and was really hoping this would be a fair comparison that would help me
I’ve only used emacs in the past and, although it gave me large testicles, it isn’t truly cross platform and requires a lot of configuration for the multi-mode web development I would be using it for.
Vim seems to work properly out of the box with 2 minutes of the configuration, but I now need to learn what the buttons do…
Learn the basics from vimtutor then just keep using it. The more you use it the more you will learn, you will never learn all the features but that’s not the point. The point is to work out when you are doing something repetitive and then learn how to do that more efficiently. I’ve been using Vim for 5 years and learn new useful tricks all the time (e.g. in normal mode “dib” deletes inside brackets, I didn’t even have to look that one up I just guessed it one day and it worked, made me smile).
While I know this was an april fools joke cast, I kind of wished this was a real cast. I, for one, am a Vim user till death, though I have nothing against emacs, it just makes more sense to me. For simple text editing I use the gui version, while in an ssh session, just Vim, when I am working on a normal software project, I use Netbeans with the jVi (nbvi) plugin that perfectly mirrors Vim. I even go so far as to change the shells command line editing to vi key bindings instead of emacs (the default). The only down side of this is when I am on a machine that does not have this, I am totally lost for about 5 – 10 minutes until I adjust to not having my normal navigation and editing. I even have a plugin for firefox called Vimperator from vimperator.org. That is how much of a Vim user I am. I spend my life in front of a keyboard and most of the time editing code, so, this is an important topic and should become a REAL podcast.
I think the point is that it really doesn’t matter if you use emacs or vim. The thing that does matter is the difference between writing code in a notepad like editor and something more full-featured.
Shot of Genius… love this one!
Oh, and I use nano on the command line or GEdit within Gnome.
… and I’m fully prepared to be laughed out of town for nano.
Nano is great. Why use more editor than you need?
(Meta-question: should one capitalise a lowercase name like “nano” if it appears at the start of a sentence?)
That’s a good question.
If you’re referring to nano as the actual command, then no… as ‘Nano’ would not execute nano.
As nano is the official spelling of the product, as suggested here: http://www.nano-editor.org/ then again I would say no.
So, I set this up to play on my android Listen app before I got on the highway. After I stopped laughing I glanced down to see how much more I had to listen to, I saw that the whole episode was ten minutes and change, I figured that I could take it and didn’t need to pull over to set up the next one. I hit the forward button…after what seemed like too long, I looked down to see that, yes I was right, it is ten minutes but the display showed that it was currently at 16:53 and counting, out of ten minutes, I laughed again, I felt like I was stuck in some sort of weird torture loop!
Well… No.
Yes
Vi? Emacs? Hardcore geeks edit each bit individually on the hard drive using tiny magnets.
No, it doesn’t matter.
I’ll use whatever is available at the time, I have a small preference for nano or emacs over vi/vim but that’s because they seem a little more sane to use to me.
I don’t care what you use, as long as you can keep up.
Though I have never read it, but a number of people have quoted the Pragmatic Programmer: know one editor and know it well.
That is all (just be quick in your chosen editor).
Gedit all the way.
Well I enjoyed it.
Too bad this was an April Fools episode, and not a real discussion. To me, both emacs and vi seem like something that reached a certain tech level 15 years ago, at which point the developers gave up. I find all the text editors I’ve tried on Linux (vi, emacs, vim, kate, anjuta, pico, nano, joe, gedit, nedit, and many others) to be truly lacking either in ease-of-use or functionality. I wouldn’t be as worried about it if these were still under active development, but work on most of these editors stopped Years ago.
I use vim for light editing of files, since it is installed everywhere. But it is painful to use. Up until recently I ran the Win32 editor Boxer under Wine to get something approaching a good programmer’s editor. With my new netbook I’ve decided to try and use native Linux editors again, and the experience is driving me mad to the point where I actually consider, “I wonder how long it would take for me to write my own editor since the native Linux ones are so horrible to use.”
The choice of editor may not make a difference in the code you produce, but they do greatly affect how pleasurable coding is, and how effectively you can work. And the current selection of editors under Linux are all simply pants.