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Concept
Editor war
Summary
The editor war is the rivalry between users of the Emacs and vi (now usually Vim, or more recently Neovim) text editors. The rivalry has become an enduring part of hacker culture and the free software community.
The Emacs versus vi debate was one of the original "holy wars" conducted on Usenet groups, with many flame wars fought between those insisting that their editor of choice is the paragon of editing perfection, and insulting the other, since at least 1985. Related battles have been fought over operating systems, programming languages, version control systems, and even source code indent style.
The most important historical differences between vi and Emacs are presented in the following table:
Emacs has a non-modal interface
Non-modal nature of Emacs keybindings makes it practical to be supported as OS-wide keybindings.
One of the most ported computer programs. It runs in text mode and under graphical user interfaces on a wide variety of operating systems, including most Unix-like systems (Linux, the various BSDs, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, macOS etc.), MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, AmigaOS, and OpenVMS. Unix systems, both free and proprietary, frequently provide Emacs bundled with the operating system.
Emacs server architecture allows multiple clients to attach to the same Emacs instance and share the buffer list, kill ring, undo history and other state.
Pervasive online help system with keybindings, functions and commands documented on the fly.
Extensible and customizable Lisp programming language variant (Emacs Lisp), with features that include:
Ability to emulate vi and vim (using Evil, Viper or Vimpulse).
A powerful and extensible file manager (dired), integrated debugger, and a large set of development and other tools.
Having every command be an Emacs Lisp function enables commands to DWIM (Do What I Mean) by programmatically responding to past actions and document state. For example, a switch-or-split-window command could switch to another window if one exists, or create one if needed.
Official source
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