The Great Text-Editor Holy War Item.

Apr 22 03:42 UTC 2007

Vi or emacs?  I prefer acme (under Plan 9, or ported to Unix) or TextMate
(under Mac OS X).

This is the great text-editor holy war item.  Best to testify in the name
here....

response 2 of 80:

Apr 22 12:52 UTC 2007

pico/nano because I'm lazy and haven't learned very much vi. :)

response 4 of 80:

Apr 22 18:10 UTC 2007

Vim. I do need to learn Emacs sometime, if only to take advantage of the
Emacs-like features of the Bash shell, but I've already got an operating
system; I don't want one in my editor.

response 6 of 80:

Apr 23 06:18 UTC 2007

I prefer vi, because I am guaranteed to have the same base functionality
on UNIX, BSD, Linux, etc. I also like the fact that I don't hurt my
wrists trying to hold Esc+Shift+Control+K to make things happen. I also
don't like waiting longer for a text editor to start up than I do for a
full-blown GUI application like Gnumeric. Most of all, I learned vi
first, so I have an inherent bias towards it.

response 8 of 80:

Apr 23 20:53 UTC 2007

Heh.  Emacs was actually originally a set of macros for the TECO text editor
on the DEC PDP series of machines.  It stood for Editor MACroS.

response 10 of 80:

Apr 23 22:16 UTC 2007

 re #9:  (regarding XOFF/XON -- nothing is bound to ^S, ^Q by default,
 so far as I know.  But it's not uncommon for people to customize emacs
 with a site-specific customization file that binds functions to those
 keys.  Obviously, though, that doesn't work well via a terminal session.

response 12 of 80:

Apr 24 06:03 UTC 2007

To be fair, vi has its quirks as well. The last time I drank with a
friend from UT Austin, he put it very well: "vi has two modes: one which
beeps at me, and one which mangles my file". A mode-oriented editor
either requires you to set a bit in your brain for which mode it is in,
or be prepared to hit Esc button before doing anything to know with some
certainty which mode you are in. 

Oh, and be prepared to retrain your br@n3 when coming back to windows.
Apparently Notepad does not care much for trying to end a file by typing
"Esc :wq", though the version I had when I had that trouble was nice
enough to beep at me, just like vi. 

response 14 of 80:

Apr 24 18:07 UTC 2007

Re #10:  In just about every version of emacs I've used, ^s and ^q are 
bound to the functions "isearch-forward" (incremental search) and 
"quoted-insert" (for inserting control characters and such in the 
buffer), respectively.  I can't recall ever having a problem with them 
working correctly in an emacs terminal session.  I'm sure emacs 
accomplishes this by putting the terminal in raw or cbreak mode.

Stallman has a lengthy explanation somewhere as to why he thinks this is 
appropriate and that binding ^s and ^q to XOFF and XON is "wrong".

I posted a lengthy response on M-Net recently about vi vs. emacs and why 
I prefer the latter for source code and some other kinds of highly 
structured text.  Will repost it here eventually, possibly shortened.

response 16 of 80:

Apr 25 02:14 UTC 2007

 You're not getting the meaning I intended -- perhaps I was unclear.
 What I meant was that (presumably because of their flow control functions)
 emacs doesn't by default bind anything to ^S or ^Q.  But some sites choose
 to override the defaults, especially if they're mostly editing in an 
 environment where serial flow control is not a big issue for users.
 That can, of course, create problems when people are logging in remotely
 over some types of connections.  None of which is RMS's responsibility..

response 18 of 80:

Apr 25 16:50 UTC 2007

 I stand corrected, then.  And yeah, that's a pretty darn stupid thing to do.

response 20 of 80:

Apr 26 18:31 UTC 2007

All of that is vim. (Strict vi doesn't allow arrow keys at all, but most
variants have added that.)

response 22 of 80:

Apr 27 17:53 UTC 2007

Re #20: "Strict" vi has supported arrow keys since the 1980s when 
properly specified in the termcap.  Given the terminals and slow 
connection speeds of those times, they often didn't work very well.

Re #21: In vi, doesn't the "autoindent" option simply consist of 
indenting each line the same amount as the previous line, with special 
keys (^T, ^D) to increase and decrease the indentation level?  Right - 
not smart.

Smart indenting requires teaching the editor something about the grammar 
of the language being edited.  Thanks to emacs' extensibility via its 
embedded lisp interpreter, you can do that in emacs. It has a great C 
mode   that indents and exdents automatically - e.g. "{" increases the 
indentation level, "}" decreases it.  Recent versions also do color 
syntax highlighting.  I find these things very helpful when editing 
source code; they're a major reason I prefer emacs for editing 
structured text.  Standard emacs distributions now come standard with 
editing modes for a number of languages - Perl, PHP, Pythong, Ruby, etc.

response 24 of 80:

Apr 28 17:08 UTC 2007

Right - early arrow key support allowed it only in command mode, not 
insert mode.

You're right, vim has similar features, and is extensible via a scripting 
language.  I haven't looked at it closely enough to know how it compares 
in power to emacs lisp.

One nice feature of emacs is vi-mode, a pretty accurate and complete vi 
emulation.  You can switch in and out of it with a single keystroke (^Z in 
my setup), and it gives me access to a few operations that are easier in 
vi than emacs (e.g. repeated search-and-replace, or filtering text through 
an external command) without leaving emacs.  Best of both worlds.