(Not so) Stupid Question 299: Where does the editor war stem from?

The rivalry between different editors is as notorious as the tabs versus spaces debate. In Silicon Valley, the series on the startup in Silicon Valley called Pied Piper; the main character notoriously breaks up with hid dream girl (a developer at Google) because she uses spaces, not tabs. Arguing over indentation style might seem trivial, and the same has been said about editor wars. However, the wars are complicated and quite serious for some, in particular, the epic, the one and only, the ‘Editor war’. This war refers to the rivalry between Emacs and vi(VIM) users, a war that has been ongoing since 1985 (!). The war has given birth to parody religions such as The Church of Emacs (formed by Emacs and Richard Stallman), and plenty of memes. We have so many editors today that the flaming war has somewhat cooled down- but it is still going strong. I believe Wikipedia has the most comprehensive list on text editors, as well as an impressive comparison chart.

At work, there is only one editor we could all agree on that would be all our machines, virtual as well as physical machines. Working mainly in a Windows environment we choose Notepad ++ at work (the dev team uses VS Code and Visual Studio depending on whether they run Mac OS or Windows). Notepad++ has been around for a long time (since 2003) and is one of the most popular code editors that you can find today with 50 languages and more supported, and adding your own can be done with a little bit of reading and work. It is not so much the language support that does it for me, though; it is the massive collection of plugins that will pretty much do anything you can think of and more. After Visual Studio Notepad ++ would be my favorite.

What is your favorite? Least favorite?

(Not so) Stupid Question 299: Where does the editor war stem from?

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