The hacker community has a tradition of treating their favorite text 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, all the way down to such 'trivial' things as source code indent style.

Editor wars are usually fought between the devotees of Emacs and vi, the two most popular editors on Unix. Most Unix users and programmers use one or the other of these editors. Many are familiar with both, at least enough to get around, and so feel they are well-placed to make judgment calls as to which is "better".

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 jokingly declared himself to be St IGNUcius, a Saint in the Church of Emacs.

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

Perceived benefits of Emacs

• Emacs has a much larger set of available commands than any of the vi-like editors.
• Emacs is scriptable in a variant of LISP and has many plug-ins such as the gnus newsreader and various software development tools.
• Emacs includes vi, in the form of viper-mode. (Note that vi is not vim. Emacs does not include vim.)
• Emacs doesn't require switching between "command" and "input" mode.
• GNU EMACS can perform computations with some calendars, such as Mayan or Discordian, which are not supported by the vi-like editors.

Perceived benefits of vi-like editors

• vi commands are entered largely without the use of modifier keys such as Ctrl or Meta. Some users find this reduces wrist strain (see repetitive strain injury, quadruple bucky cokebottle (http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/quadruple-bucky)).
• vi is smaller and faster than Emacs. See feature creep.
• vi's presence is guaranteed as part of the POSIX standard.
• Vim, a popular vi-like editor, is scriptable in commonly-used languages such as Perl and Python.
• vi plays nicer with really dumb terminals; while this is less important than it used to be, sometimes this ability is still important, such as when system problems have reached the point where the GUI cannot be started, so one has only a severely-limited console environment.
• The default key bindings of EMACS conflict with some telnet implementations.

External links

• news:alt.religion.emacs
• news:comp.editors (comp.editors at Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/groups?q=comp.editors&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search))
• Church of Emacs resources (http://www.dina.dk/~abraham/religion/)
• Rules, Sins, Virtues, Gods and more of The Church of Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gospel.html)
• Saint Ignucius (http://stallman.org/saint.html) — as portrayed by Richard Stallman
• The Cult of vi (http://www.splange.freeserve.co.uk/misc/vi.html)
• $EDITOR sucks-rules-o-meter (http://www.tarunz.org/~vassilii/srom/) measures which editor's activists are more visible on the Web