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.
Emacs Lisp is a Lisp dialect made for 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.
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.
Ctags is a programming tool that generates an index file of names found in source and header files of various programming languages to aid code comprehension. Depending on the language, functions, variables, class members, macros and so on may be indexed. These tags allow definitions to be quickly and easily located by a text editor, a code search engine, or other utility. Alternatively, there is also an output mode that generates a cross reference file, listing information about various names found in a set of language files in human-readable form.
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.
Dunnet is a surreal, cyberpunk text adventure written by Ron Schnell, based on a game he wrote in 1982. The name is derived from the first three letters of dungeon and the last three letters of ARPANET. It was first written in Maclisp for the DECSYSTEM-20, then ported to Emacs Lisp in 1992. Since 1994 the game has shipped with GNU Emacs; it also has been included with XEmacs.
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.
GNU Readline is a software library that provides in-line editing and history capabilities for interactive programs with a command-line interface, such as Bash. It is currently maintained by Chet Ramey as part of the GNU Project.
Dired is a computer program for editing file system directories. It typically runs inside the Emacs text editor as a specialized mode, though standalone versions have been written. Dired was the first file manager, or visual editor of file system information. The first version of Dired was written as a stand-alone program independently in 1972 by Dave Lebling at Project MAC, and circa 1974 by Stan Kugell at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). It was incorporated into GNU Emacs from the earliest versions, and re-implemented in C and C++ on other operating systems.
The following is a comparison of notable hex editors.
MIT/GNU Scheme is a programming language, a dialect and implementation of the language Scheme, which is a dialect of Lisp. It can produce native binary files for the x86 processor architecture. It supports the R7RS-small standard. It is free and open-source software released under v2 or later of the GNU General Public License (GPL). It was first released by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986, as free software even before the Free Software Foundation, GNU, and the GPL existed. It is now part of the GNU Project.
Geany is a free and open-source 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 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."
A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.
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 29.3, released March 2024.
Uzbl is a discontinued free and open-source minimalist web browser designed for simplicity and adherence to the Unix philosophy. Development began in early 2009 and is still considered in alpha software by the developers. The core component of Uzbl is written in C, but other languages are also used, most notably Python. All parts of the Uzbl project are released as free software under GNU GPL-3.0-only.
Org Mode is a mode for document editing, formatting, and organizing within the free software text editor GNU Emacs and its derivatives, designed for notes, planning, and authoring. The name is used to encompass plain text files that include simple marks to indicate levels of a hierarchy, and an editor with functions that can read the markup and manipulate hierarchy elements.
NixOS is a free and open source Linux distribution based on the Nix package manager. NixOS uses an immutable design and an atomic update model. Its use of a declarative configuration system allows reproducibility and portability.
qutebrowser is a QtWebEngine web browser for Linux, Windows, and macOS operating systems with Vim-style key bindings and a minimal GUI. It is keyboard-driven and is inspired by similar software such as Vimperator and dwb. It uses DuckDuckGo as the default search engine. qutebrowser is included in the native repositories of Linux distributions such as Fedora and Arch Linux. qutebrowser is developed by Florian Bruhin, for which he received a CH Open Source award in 2016.
Magit is an interface to the Git version control system (a Git Client), implemented as a GNU Emacs package written in Elisp. It is made available through the MELPA package repository, on which it is the most-downloaded non-library package, with over 3.7 million downloads as of February 2023.
