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 integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source-code editor, build automation tools, and a debugger. Some IDEs, such as IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse and Lazarus contain the necessary compiler, interpreter or both; others, such as SharpDevelop and NetBeans, do not.
A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. An example of such program is "notepad" software. Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to change files such as configuration files, documentation files and programming language source code.
Vim is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program. It is an improved clone of Bill Joy's vi. Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar, derived Vim from a port of the Stevie editor for Amiga and released a version to the public in 1991. Vim is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. Since its release for the Amiga, cross-platform development has made it available on many other systems. In 2018, it was voted the most popular editor amongst Linux Journal readers; in 2015 the Stack Overflow developer survey found it to be the third most popular text editor, and in 2019 the fifth most popular development environment.
vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.
In computing, the utility diff is a data comparison tool that computes and displays the differences between the contents of files. Unlike edit distance notions used for other purposes, diff is line-oriented rather than character-oriented, but it is like Levenshtein distance in that it tries to determine the smallest set of deletions and insertions to create one file from the other. The utility displays the changes in one of several standard formats, such that both humans or computers can parse the changes, and use them for patching.
The Bourne shell (sh) is a shell command-line interpreter for computer operating systems.
In computing, tar is a computer software utility for collecting many files into one archive file, often referred to as a tarball, for distribution or backup purposes. The name is derived from "tape archive", as it was originally developed to write data to sequential I/O devices with no file system of their own, such as devices that use magnetic tape. The archive data sets created by tar contain various file system parameters, such as name, timestamps, ownership, file-access permissions, and directory organization. POSIX abandoned tar in favor of pax, yet tar sees continued widespread use.
uuencoding is a form of binary-to-text encoding that originated in the Unix programs uuencode and uudecode written by Mary Ann Horton at the University of California, Berkeley in 1980, for encoding binary data for transmission in email systems.
NEdit, the Nirvana editor, is a text editor and source code editor for the X Window System. It has an interface similar to text editors on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh, rather than to older UNIX editors like Emacs. It was initially developed by Mark Edel for Fermilab and released under a very restrictive licence, but today it is distributed under the less restrictive GPL-2.0-or-later and is developed as an independent open-source project by a team of developers. Nedit was also distributed with the IRIX operating system.
This article provides basic comparisons for notable 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.
The computer program par is a text formatting utility for Unix and Unix-like operating systems, written by Adam M. Costello as a replacement for the fmt command.
cscope is a programming tool which works in console mode, text-based interface, that allows computer programmers or software developers to search source code of the programming language C, with some support for C++ and Java. It is often used on very large projects to aid code comprehension to find source code, functions, declarations, definitions, and regular expression. cscope is free and released under a BSD license. The original developer of cscope is Joe Steffen.
Info is a software utility which forms a hypertextual, multipage documentation and help viewer working on a command-line interface.
ne is a console text editor for POSIX computer operating systems such as Linux or Mac OS X. It uses the terminfo library, but it can also be compiled using a bundled copy of the GNU termcap implementation. There is also a Cygwin version. It was developed by Sebastiano Vigna of the University of Milan.
GNU Emacs is a text editor and suite of free software tools. Its development began in 1984 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.
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 29.4 , released June 2024.
GNU GLOBAL is a software tool for source code tagging to aid code comprehension. It works in a uniform fashion in various environments, allowing users to find all objects declared in the source files and to move among them easily. It is particularly useful for working on projects containing numerous sub-projects and complex syntax trees generated by the compilation process functions using conditional compilation). It is similar to older tagging software such as ctags and etags, but differs in its independence from any specific text editor.
Pluma is a fork of gedit 2 and the default text editor of the MATE desktop environment used in Linux distributions. It extends the basic functionality with other features and plugins.
