The editor war is the rivalry between users of the Emacs and vi text editors. The rivalry has become an enduring part of hacker culture and the free software community.
An X window manager is a window manager that runs on top of the X Window System, a windowing system mainly used on Unix-like systems.
Sawfish is a window manager for the X Window System. It aims to manage windows in the most flexible and attractive manner possible. It is able to match a window by multiple criteria such as application, size or role, and based on this, can change the window's position, appearance, or behavior. This allows for highly customized window handling such as web browser windows opening full-screen without borders on a secondary monitor, a default terminal emulator window displaying full-screen at the desktop level, and all dialog box windows under a certain size opening on the lower right corner of the main monitor while larger ones are centered.
In Unix computing, Ion is a tiling and tabbing window manager for the X Window System. It is designed such that it is possible to manage windows using only a keyboard, without needing a mouse. It is the successor of PWM and is written by the same author, Tuomo Valkonen. Since the first release of Ion in the summer 2000, similar alternative window management ideas have begun to show in other new window managers: Larswm, ratpoison, StumpWM, wmii, xmonad and dwm.
In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an early form of human–computer interaction, before the advent of bitmapped displays and modern conventional graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Like modern GUIs, they can use the entire screen area and may accept mouse and other inputs. They may also use color and often structure the display using box-drawing characters such as ┌ and ╣. The modern context of use is usually a terminal emulator.
Krusader is an advanced orthodox file manager for KDE and other desktops in the Unix world. It is similar to the console-based GNU Midnight Commander, GNOME Commander for the GNOME desktop environment, or Total Commander for Windows, all of which can trace their paradigmatic features to the original Norton Commander for DOS. It supports extensive archive handling, mounted filesystem support, FTP, advanced search, viewer/editor, directory synchronisation, file content comparisons, batch renaming, etc.
Conkeror is a Mozilla-based web browser designed to be navigated primarily by a computer keyboard. Its design is mainly patterned after the text editor GNU Emacs, with some influence from other programs, including vi.
In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more common approach of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects (windows) that tries to fully emulate the desktop metaphor.
larswm is a window manager for the X window system that follows the tiling window manager paradigm. Using ideas from the older 9wm window manager, it features automatic tiling and virtual desktops. It also borrows other ideas, for example a limited form of plumbing, from the Acme development environment. Objects are tiled into non-overlapping areas, instead of using windows that can be stacked, as this approach can result in lower memory and CPU requirements.
StumpWM is a tiling window manager that was created when developer Shawn Betts found ratpoison growing increasingly large and "lispy". Intended as a successor to ratpoison, StumpWM is released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later license.
MicroEMACS is a small, portable Emacs-like text editor originally written by Dave Conroy in 1985, and further developed by Daniel M. Lawrence (1958–2010) and was maintained by him. MicroEMACS has been ported to many operating systems, including CP/M, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, VMS, Atari ST, AmigaOS, OS-9, NeXTSTEP, and various Unix-like operating systems.
dwm is a minimalist dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed by Suckless that has influenced the development of several other X window managers, including xmonad and awesome. It is externally similar to wmii, but internally much simpler. dwm is written purely in C for performance and lacks any configuration interface besides editing the source code. One of the project's guidelines is that the source code is intended never to exceed 2000 SLOC, and options meant to be user-configurable are all contained in a single header file.
The tables below compare features of notable note-taking software.
xmonad is a dynamic window manager (tiling) for the X Window System, noted for being written in the functional programming language Haskell.
GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of the free software movement. Its tag line is "the extensible self-documenting text editor."
Emacs, originally named EMACS, is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on GNU Emacs, directly descended from the original, is ongoing; its latest version is 29.2, released January 2024.
In computing, a dynamic window manager is a tiling window manager where windows are tiled based on preset layouts between which the user can switch. Layouts typically have a main area and a secondary area. The main area usually shows one window, but one can also change the number of windows in this area. Its purpose is to reserve more space for the more important window(s). The secondary area shows the other windows.
awesome is a dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed in the C and Lua programming languages. Lua is also used for configuring and extending the window manager. Its development began as a fork of dwm, though has differed considerably since. It aims to be extremely small and fast, yet extensively customizable. It makes it possible for the user to manage windows with the use of keyboard.
i3 is a tiling window manager designed for X11, inspired by wmii and written in C. It supports tiling, stacking, and tabbing layouts, which are handled manually. Its configuration is achieved via a plain text file and extending i3 is possible using its Unix domain socket and JSON based IPC interface from many programming languages.
