"Forget Apple vs. Google. Emacs and Vi have been battling for text-editor supremacy among programmers for 40 years."

http://www.slate.com/articles/techno...ogrammers.html

A nice article presenting both sides of the argument. I use both depending what I do.

@sycamorex, I can appreciate your editor adaptability.

I prefer vi over emacs. My first programmer editor was q.exe [1]. Joe's Own Editor [2] is practically the same, and it works on Linux.

[1]
http://www.semware.com/html/tsejrfl.html

[2]
http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/

Emacs is a creation of St IGNUcius.
Vi is a creation of the Devil. VI VI VI = 666, the Number of the Beast.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/124...rough-the-mind

vi vs emacs must be one of the oldest extant flame wars

It's easy: "my way is right." Do it My Way™ or you are Clueless.™ It's just that simple.

ive never used emacs for no other reason then when i first picked up one of the old RedHat books that they used to sell with the install CDs (oh something around RH 4 or so) it talked about vi bring on all major distros at the time including Unix systems. it talked about pico and nano as well as emacs, but back in the 36.6K days it might not always be easy to go around installing a text editor, but odds were you would find vi so just learn it and use it. so i did and have.

I have used gedit and enjoy it from time to time, but many systems i work with dont have a GUI so vi is my fall back to editor.

Well, vi has been part of the default install for many versions of *nix, inc Solaris, HP-UX, AIX etc as well as Linux, *BSD etc for many years (possibly decades).
Its also very lightweight.

nano, ftw!

I prefer emacs, because I've learned it very well. I know vi also and use that regularly for quick edits or edits on systems which are limited and don't have emacs. I can't see editing large code files and making extensive changes using vi. I know people do that and it's completely possible; emacs is a bit easier to use ... for me.

This is sort of like the old argument about RPN logic versus Algebraic logic on a calculator. I resisted for years and when I finally broke down to buy an HP calculator because my friends claimed they last and buttons don't break on them; I made a comment that I'd finally have to learn the RPN logic and the sales guy said, "No ... they just came out with some models that use the normal logic." So of course I bought that. My thinking there is, I'm no dummy; sure I can learn RPN logic, but ... why? Just so I can say I can reorient my thinking about a mathematical computation in a different form? Same thing for vi. Yes, I know the basics. But do I need to know all the possible key sequences for commands? Editors like wordpad, notepad, gedit ... those all provide much more common and intuitive manners to manipulate content. Emacs actually does not, but as I've said I happened to learn it well.

What I don't think I like to much are the additions of special variations to specifically edit the sudo permissions or other stuff like that, visudo. You're not running vi, you're running something that contains the vi name but it doesn't use vi commands.

I use 'ed'

https://www.gnu.org/software/ed/manual/ed_manual.html