Church of Emacs - Current State of The Editor War

Current State of The Editor War

In the past, many small editors modeled after or derived from vi flourished. This was due to the importance of conserving memory with the comparatively minuscule amount available at the time. As computers have become more powerful, many vi clones, Vim in particular, have grown in size and code complexity. These vi variants of today, as with the old lightweight Emacs variants, tend to have many of the perceived benefits and drawbacks of the opposing side. For example, Vim without any extensions requires about ten times the disk space required by vi, and recent versions of Vim can have more extensions and run slower than past versions of Emacs. Moreover, with the large amounts of RAM in modern computers, both vi and Emacs are lightweight compared to large integrated development environments such as Eclipse, which tend to draw derision from both vi and Emacs users alike.

Tim O'Reilly said, in 1999, that O'Reilly Media's tutorial on vi sells twice as many copies as that on Emacs (which could mean either that vi is more popular, or that it is harder to learn, or that the O'Reilly book on vi is comparatively more popular than that on Emacs). Many advanced programmers use either Emacs and vi or their various offshoots, including Linus Torvalds who uses MicroEMACS.

In addition to vi and Emacs workalikes, pico and its free and open source clone nano and other text editors such as ne often have their own third-party advocates in the editor wars, though not to the extent of vi and Emacs.

Many operating systems, especially GNU/Linux and BSD derivatives, bundle multiple text editors with the operating system to cater for user demand. For example, a default installation of Mac OS X contains Emacs, Vim and nano.