The editor war is the rivalry between users of the Emacs and vi text editors. The rivalry has become a lasting part of hacker culture and the free software community.
Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language used as a scripting language by Emacs. It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in C, as is the Lisp interpreter. Emacs Lisp is also termed Elisp, although there is also an older, unrelated Lisp dialect with that name.
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools, and a debugger. Some IDEs, such as NetBeans and Eclipse, contain the necessary compiler, interpreter, or both; others, such as SharpDevelop and Lazarus, do not.
w3m is a free software/open source text-based web browser and terminal pager. It has support for tables, frames, SSL connections, color and inline images on suitable terminals. Generally, it renders pages in a form as true to their original layout as possible.
XEmacs is a graphical- and console-based text editor which runs on almost any Unix-like operating system as well as Microsoft Windows. XEmacs is a fork, based on a version of GNU Emacs from the late 1980s. Any user can download, use, and modify XEmacs as free software available under the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version.
GNU Privacy Guard, a free-software replacement for Symantec's PGP cryptographic software suite, complies with RFC 4880, the IETF standards-track specification of OpenPGP. Modern versions of PGP are interoperable with GnuPG and other OpenPGP-compliant systems.
Gnus, or Gnus Network User Services, is a message reader which is part of GNU Emacs. It supports reading and composing both e-mail and news and can also act as an RSS reader, web processor, and directory browser for both local and remote filesystems.
The GNU Project is a free-software, mass-collaboration project, first announced on September 27, 1983 by Richard Stallman at MIT. Its aim is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices, by collaboratively developing and providing software that is based on the following freedom rights: users are free to run the software, share it, study it and modify it. GNU software guarantees these freedom-rights legally, and is therefore free software; the use of the word "free" always being taken to refer to freedom.
Conkeror is a discontinued 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.
ERC is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client integrated into GNU Emacs. It is written in Emacs Lisp.
This article provides basic comparisons for common text editors. More feature details for text editors are available from the Category of text editor features and from the individual products' articles. This article may not be up-to-date or necessarily all-inclusive.
Hemlock is a free Emacs text editor for most POSIX-compliant Unix systems. It follows the tradition of the Lisp Machine editor ZWEI and the ITS/TOPS-20 implementation of Emacs, but differs from XEmacs or GNU Emacs, the most popular Emacs variants, in that it is written in Common Lisp rather than Emacs Lisp and C—although it borrows features from the later editors. Hemlock was originally written by the CMU Spice project in Spice Lisp for the PERQ computer.
GNU Bazaar is a distributed and client–server revision control system sponsored by Canonical.
Aquamacs is an Emacs text editor for macOS. It is based on GNU Emacs, currently tracking the GNU Emacs version 25.3 branch. Although GNU Emacs has had native UI support on macOS using the Cocoa API since version 23, Aquamacs modifies the user interface to conform with macOS standards in preference to Emacs standards.
Geany (IPA:ʒeːniː) is a lightweight GUI text editor using Scintilla and GTK+, including basic IDE features. It is designed to have short load times, with limited dependency on separate packages or external libraries on Linux. It has been ported to a wide range of operating systems, such as BSD, Linux, macOS, Solaris and Windows. The Windows port lacks an embedded terminal window; also missing from the Windows version are the external development tools present under Unix, unless installed separately by the user. Among the supported programming languages and markup languages are C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, HTML, LaTeX, CSS, Python, Perl, Ruby, Pascal, Haskell, Erlang, Vala and many others.
GNU Emacs is the most popular and most ported Emacs text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman. In common with other varieties of Emacs, GNU Emacs is extensible using a Turing complete programming language. GNU Emacs has been called "the most powerful text editor available today". With proper support from the underlying system, GNU Emacs is able to display files in multiple character sets, and has been able to simultaneously display most human languages since at least 1999. Throughout its history, GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project, and a flagship of the free software movement. GNU Emacs is sometimes abbreviated as GNUMACS, especially to differentiate it from other EMACS variants. The tag line for GNU Emacs is "the extensible self-documenting text editor".
Climacs is an open source text editor written in Common Lisp that is similar to GNU Emacs and is released under the GNU LGPL software license.
Spacemacs is computer software, a configuration framework for GNU Emacs. It can take advantage of all of GNU Emacs' features, including both graphical and command-line user interfaces, and being executable under X Window System and within a Unix shell terminal. It is free and open-source software (FOSS) released under the GNU General Public License version 3.
