Editor War: Everything you need to know about it!
The Editor War has a long history behind it. Like most religious wars, this one is partly based on a history that may not be as relevant as it once was. We have looked into the religious Editor War and summarized the most important info in this post.
What is a (Text-) Editor?
A text editor is a computer program that allows users to create, modify or edit simple text files. Such programs are also known as "Notepad software", in reference to the name of Microsoft Notepad. It can be used to create computer programs, edit the source code of programming languages or HTML, and create web page or web design templates. A text editor is now most often used for programming purposes instead of creating documents, as it was originally.
Some text editors can read, edit, and quickly open unusually large files such as log files or an entire database in a single file. This is necessary for many professional computer applications because they contain files that may be too large for the computer's main memory.
What is the Editor War?
Most editor users don't think much about text editors. However, not all text editors are the same and over time you may find that: A particular editor is best suited for one's needs. In this particular world of hacker culture and the free software community, a rivalry arose between users of two different text editors: Emacs and vi (also called Vim or Neovim). The rivalry has become an enduring part of both cultures.
In der Geschichte der Menschheit gab es zahlreiche Themen, zu denen Nutzer und Fans ihre Ansichten geteilt und miteinander argumentiert haben. Diese heiligen Kriege gab es bisher in verschiedenen Versionen: iOS vs. Android, Apple vs. Samsung, Marvel vs. DC usw. Eine ähnliche Diskussion, über die Benutzer, insbesondere die der Linux-Community, hitzig werden, ist die Emacs vs. Vim-Debatte, die seit Jahrzehnten andauert. Die Debatte zwischen Emacs und vi war eine der ursprünglichen „heiligen Kriege“, die auf Usenet-Gruppen geführt wurden. Es gab viele hitzige Diskussionen, um zu beweisen, dass der Editor der Wahl der Inbegriff von Perfektion ist.
Vim is a modal editor and one of the oldest UNIX-based text editors on the market. This text editor is an evolution of vi, a text editor from the early days of UNIX. "Vim" stands for "vi Improved." After its introduction, Vim quickly gained popularity because it not only integrated almost all of vi's features, but also added some additional features that made it much more powerful than its predecessors.
The first version of Vim was released to the public in 1991 by Bram Moolenaar. Since then it has become one of the most popular and feature-rich editors. In 1998, the fifth generation of Vim was released and with it, one of the most used features of the editor, "scripting", was introduced. Now users can write their own scripts for Vim and eventually extend its functionality.
Vim's charm comes from the fact that it is extremely lightweight and has an interface with multiple modes, each of which has a different but useful purpose. With features like a multi-level undo tree, a huge collection of plugins and powerful text editing tools, Vim is absolutely solid and excels as a text editor.
Emacs, on the other hand, is a family of highly customizable, real-time, self-documenting text editors designed for POSIX operating systems and available on Linux, macOS, BSD, Windows, and more. It is a cross-platform editor with a non-modal interface. Emacs is quite similar to Vim, an old text editor that has been popular for years. Rather than calling it a text editor, however, Emacs is so much more. Known for its high extensibility, Emacs is easy to tweak and customize, and allows you to implement various functions and methods, which makes it clear how powerful this tool can be.
Emacs supports a wealth of packages and extensions that users can use to further configure it, making it even more powerful than before. It includes several handy features, such as auto-completion. This lets you start typing a command, which the editor then completes automatically.
Vim vs. Emacs - The main differences
Memory usage
The memory usage of an editor is an important factor to consider, especially during the startup process. The memory usage of Vim and Emacs varies, with advantages and disadvantages for each approach. Vim uses little memory during startup, so it starts quickly but with limited customizability. Emacs, on the other hand, offers customizable settings, but with a slower startup.
Efficient and effective memory usage is of distinguishing importance for one's text editor, since any error in memory management slows down the editor. Consequently, Vim and Emacs offer advantages to some users and disadvantages to others. One thing should be considered, however: The importance of memory usage varies between languages.
Keyboard functionality
How does the keyboard functionality of Vim and Emacs compare? Vim suffers from awkwardness in its keyboard layout and lacks some optimized shortcuts. Alternatively, Emacs uses meta-key chords to enable additional functions to create customized and mode-specific operations. Emacs has an advantage when it comes to keyboard functionality.
Vim lacks these features because it is based on the older text editor Vi. Like its ancestor, Vim's keyboard function seems to be somewhat outdated. However, Vim still allows the user to customize the key bindings to make it more convenient. But it takes some time for the user to set the key bindings to their liking. The keyboard functionality is a helpful tool no matter what programming language is used.
Adaptability
Both Emacs and Vim are known for being extremely customizable and versatile, with a variety of plugins and extensions that can be used to configure the programs by adding more features.
Emacs goes one step further and uses the lisp programming language. With lisp, users can implement and redefine almost anything in Emacs. Emacs provides users who are accustomed to using Vim with packages that can be used to achieve Vim-like behavior within Emacs. The most famous package is Evil mode, an extremely powerful Emacs mode that fully emulates Vi and tries to extend it by adding compatible and powerful features.
Languages
Vim and Emacs handle languages differently. Vim comes from the old-school Unix environment, so it works well with Linux, DOS, BSD, HP-UX, Mac, and other operating systems. Emacs also works with Unix systems and uses special main modes for Scheme, Lisp, Perl, Java, Ruby and more.
Overall, Vim offers slightly faster performance. But both Vim and Emacs offer good system support and many language pack options, allowing the user to add more languages or operating systems if needed.
User interface
The Vim and Emacs user environments are well designed and functional. Vim has more features than its predecessor, but retains a text-based environment. Emacs started as a text-based program, but new versions include a modern GUI. If the user prefers a classic layout, Vim is ideal. However, the Emacs GUI still has its advantages.
Experienced programmers benefit from the straightforward approach of a text-based editor like VIM. It is familiar and lacks "distracting" bells and whistles, although it has more features than its predecessor. Vim users who prefer a GUI can use gVim or other derivatives. Alternatively, the Emacs GUI approach provides an attractive and easy-to-navigate interface, which is advantageous in many situations. Beginners and professionals prefer GUIs, especially when it comes to complex projects.
Religious traits of the Editor Wars
The Church of Emacs was founded by Emacs and the creator of the GNU project, Richard Stallman. This religion is a parody religion and refers to Vi as the "editor of the beast" (vi-vi-vi is 6-6-6 in Roman numerals). It does not contradict the use of Vi; rather, it calls Vi a proprietary software anathema.
"Using a free version of Vi is not a sin, it's a penance." - Richard Stallman for ourTV.net.au (A community TV channel in Canberra videotaped a talk by Stallman, couldn't get their project off the ground due to lack of funds)
The Church of Emacs has its own newsgroup, alt.religion.emacs , with posts purporting to support this belief system. Stallman refers to himself as St. I. GNU -cius, a saint in the Church of Emacs.
In turn, the cult of vi was created by vi supporters, described by some Emacs users as an attempt to "imitate their betters". Regarding the modal nature of vi (often a point of frustration for new users), some Emacs users joke that vi has two modes: "beep repeatedly" and "break everything".
Vi users like to joke that Emacs' key sequences cause carpal tunnel syndrome, or mention one of the many satirical extensions of the EMACS acronym:
- Escape Meta Alt Control Shift - a side hustle about Emacs' dependence on extra keys
- EMACS Makes Any Computer Slow
- Eventually Munches All Computer Storage - in relation to Emacs' high system resource requirements.
- GNU EMACS became Generally Not Used, Except Middle Aged Computer Scientists - indicating its most ardent fans and its declining use among younger programmers.
As an allusion to the creeping excessive continuous enhancement or addition of new features to Emacs, Vi proponents have been known to describe Emacs as "a great operating system that only lacks a decent editor". Emacs proponents have been known to counter that the editor is actually very good, but the operating system could use improvement (referring to Emacs' famous lack of parallelism, which has now been added).
The Google search engine also got in on the joke by returning searches for vi with the result "Did you mean: emacs" and searches for Emacs with the result "Did you mean: Vi".
Summary
Like Vim, Emacs is a text editor that can be run with a GUI. But Emacs is much more than just a text editor. In fact, Emacs also acts as an email client, integrated development environment, document browser, etc. Unlike Vim, Emacs allows its users to use the Lisp programming language to write new commands or overwrite old ones.
This feature is called online extensibility. Emacs is also highly customizable, which means that every single detail can be customized to a very granular level, making its capabilities practically limitless. However, Vim is still one of the most popular and widely used text editors, found in almost every Unix-based system.
At this point, we would like to note that the editor war has a long history in terms of content and, as is so often the case in the software industry, there is also a rapid change here. Nowadays text editors still play an important role in development, but the picture has changed a lot. Especially in the last 10 years it is no longer of great importance that VIM is preinstalled on many systems. Nor is it significant that Emacs is memory-hungry or has a slow startup time.
Until about 2010 there were basically only IDEs, programs like Eclipse, VisualStudio, JetBrains IDEs, etc.. They were preceded by VIM and Emacs. After 2010, the software environment began to change and other editors were added, for example Sublime, VSCode, Atom, and others, which became widespread and VIM and Emacs thus took on a less and less important role.
In 2015, Microsoft released a disruptive technology called the LSP protocol. This led to VSCode becoming by far the most widely used editor, which could be equipped with many functionalities just like an IDE or Emacs. However, VSCode offers many advantages over VIM and Emacs, such as a modern UI, many plugins, a plugin marketplace, an easier start for beginners, etc.. At the same time, the LSP protocol also made VIM, Emacs, Neovim, Sublime, etc. very similar in their functionalities.
Source http://blog.davidecoppola.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/market_share_cpp_ides_pie.png
Until about 2010 there were basically only IDEs, programs like Eclipse, VisualStudio, JetBrains IDEs, etc.. They were preceded by VIM and Emacs. After 2010, the software environment began to change and other editors were added, for example Sublime, VSCode, Atom, and others, which became widespread and VIM and Emacs thus took on a less and less important role.
In 2015, Microsoft released a disruptive technology called the LSP protocol. This led to VSCode becoming by far the most widely used editor, which could be equipped with many functionalities just like an IDE or Emacs. However, VSCode offers many advantages over VIM and Emacs, such as a modern UI, many plugins, a plugin marketplace, an easier start for beginners, etc.. At the same time, the LSP protocol also made VIM, Emacs, Neovim, Sublime, etc. very similar in their functionalities.
Over time, the market share as well as the user numbers of VIM and Emacs have drastically decreased. Vim's market share in 2018 was 16.5%, while Emacs had a percentage share of just 7.4%. For a younger generation of editor users, such a historical war between two editors is questionable, as they probably use a GUI editor like Sublime or Eclipse.
