Editor War

The sad truth about the computer world, at least for young people in University or College, or hobbyists, is that it is home to a lot of people who are egotistical, arrogant, elitist, and anti-social who are unjustifiably caught up in themselves to be able to effectively work with other people. From what I hear, a lot of this goes away once you enter the workforce, supposedly via the interview selection process. This culture has produced some of the most meaningless conflicts humanity has ever seen, one of which being the so-called Editor War.

The Editor War is a dispute amongst two camps of programmers, those who use the text editor called vi (and related text editors), and those who use one called Emacs (or related). Both were released around the same time in the late 70s, and have remained two of the most popular text editors for writing computer programs. There are a lot of differences between the two, vi is very small and simple, yet allows you to perform complex text editing tasks, while emacs is very large containing far more features than vi, including a built in Tetris-like game. Emacs is very extensible, and very complex text editing tasks can be performed using the right macros. I believe that what drove the dispute originally is that Emacs was written in the Lisp programming language, which in the 70s was not a very popular programming language, and was decidedly slower than C, which vi was written in. However, nowadays this argument doesn't hold weight, as Lisp is much faster now than before.

I don't really plan on describing every difference between the two editors, my main purpose is to illustrate the pointlessness of the dispute. Choice of text editor is a personal choice that doesn't make any difference to other people; you produce a text file with content, through whatever means you like, and email it to your boss who requested it. All your boss cares about is the content, not which text editor you used to produce it. You will have to decide yourself which text editor you like, but once you pick one, try to stay with it and not be swayed by others opinion.