The Editor Wars
September 8, 2025
If you desire to witness the Geek equivalent of Ultimate Fighting, lock a few of us into a cage then direct us designate one text editor as superior to all others. Caution! stinky stuff will hit fans who stand too close!
Most program writing and nearly all administrative configuration settings for computers get typed as plain text. This web page, for example, is just some text with embedded instructions telling your device how it should look on your screen.
I typed it in a text editor called nano. The name implies something very small. It is a play on words, as nano was adapted from an even smaller editor named pico. Ha ha! very funny, if you are a Geek.
The point of telling that story is that these tools have a history. They have ancestors! Their legacy dates back to the 1950s when computers were huge, memory was scarce, paper printouts were the only kind of display and keyboards were the new technology. Prior to keyboards, computer input was done with punch cards.
Another editor I use fairly often is vim. The acronym stands for vi improved, while vi in turn was an outgrowth of ed, a name which literally meant, You see, they gave their programs very short names in those olden days because names consume memory and memory was expensive. The programs featured cryptic commands of one or two letters, for the same reason. Alas, their descendants still use those terse commands despite memory becoming abundant and cheap. The need to learn, remains. These ancient tools are kept modern by devoted volunteers who continually improve and extend them. It means there is always more to learn about each one. This week I began to dabble with the grand, old editor named emacs, arguably the Most Geeky Of Them All. All of the editors mentioned above can be used in a console, which means no mouse — keyboard only. There are professional tasks for which that limitation may actually be a virtue. I will not even talk here about the countless editing facilities built into modern mouseware. People who make their living writing code or administering system configuration files need to invest significant time and effort to learning the editor they choose for the purpose. Behavioral psychologists have identified an Oh! the thunders and lightnings that have rattled the chat rooms of Linux over the years! I remember when computer books would devote a chapter to the pros and cons of each of vim and emacs. Books at least tried to keep the rhetoric even-handed and professional. Now let me give you an idea of the mud-slinging that goes on outside the library and the book store. I found an article online today having the title: Well, not so fast. I am a newcomer who happens not to hate emacs. That article complained of unfamiliar keystroke combinations required for moving around in a file. True enough, emacs imposes a learning requirement. I wish it had felt more intuitively familiar on first impression. But then, all of the other editors subjected me to their special idiosyncracies, too. Code dogs can learn new tricks, if they choose, and soon enough I was writing a web page using the emacs editor. Somewhere along the path of learning emacs I encountered a mention that nano offered far more capability than I had known. I dug into it and sure enough, found more to learn. Think of this web page as a lab session to exercise new knowledge. To my mind the different editors look more like a beach party than a beauty pageant. Difference is fun! Why limit to one when you can enjoy them all? Paraphrasing the old hymn, let there be peace on (editor) Earth, and let it begin with me.editor
endowment effect
which biases people to prefer a thing in their possession over all other, even very similar things in other people’s hands. Some Geeks can become downright passionate about praising and defending whichever text editor they spent the greatest amount of time learning to use well.
Every Newcomer To EMACS Hates It Passionately!