Editor war

The editor war is an ongoing debate about which text editor is best. The two largest camps are those favoring vi and those favoring Emacs.

Perceived benefits of Emacs

• Emacs has a much larger set of available commands than any of the vi-like editors.
• Emacs is scriptable in a variant of LISP and has many plug-ins such as the gnus newsreader and various software development tools.
• Emacs includes vi, in the form of viper-mode. (Note that vi is not vim. Emacs does not include vim.)
• Emacs doesn't require switching between "command" and "input" mode.
• GNU EMACS can perform computations with some calendars, such as Mayan or Discordian, which are not supported by the vi-like editors.
• Special editing modes for 25 programming languages including Java, Perl, C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, Lisp, Scheme, and Pascal.
• Special scripting language modes for Bash, other common shells, and creating Makefiles for GNU/Linux, Unix, Windows/DOS and VMS systems.
• Support for typing and displaying in 21 non-English languages, including Chinese, Czech, Hindi, Hebrew, Russian, Vietnamese and all Western European languages.
• Creates Postscript output from plain text files and has special editing modes for LaTeX and TeX
• Debug from inside Emacs
• Maintain program ChangeLogs
• Extensive file merge and diff functions
• Directory navigation: flag, move and delete files and sub-directories recursively.
• Use Emacs as a shell itself (Eshell)
• Version control management for release and beta versions, with CVS and RCS integration and much more!
• Emacs users can simply add a mode to the existing implementation of emacs using elisp, vi users have to create an entirely new version of vi. (i.e. emacs includes vi with viper-mode)