Editor wars

The hacker community has a tradition of treating their favorite 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.

Editor wars are usually fought between the devotees of Emacs and vi, the two most popular editors on Unix. 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 declared himself to be St IGNUcius, a Saint in the Church of Emacs. This is not to be taken seriously.

vi lovers have created an opposing Cult of vi, which some Emacs users call "clearly a miserable attempt to ape their betters."

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Links:

• news://alt.religion.emacs
• http://www.dina.dk/~abraham/religion/ -- Church of Emacs resources
• http://stallman.org/saint.html -- Saint Ignucius
• http://www.splange.freeserve.co.uk/misc/vi.html -- wherein you might encounter Venom Incarnate

/Talk