By Mike Maher.
A ‘VI’ user would say, “Your editor sucks.. it’s slow and
bloated.”
While an EMACS user would respond, “Yeah well why don’t you
press -whatever!!”
These types of discussions could degenerate any thread at any
time. People around the world would refer to this debate as the
‘Editor Wars.’ There was one problem. There was no real forum for
the score to really be settled.
But time passed and things changed.
At last years Linux Expo, the Editor Wars were taken to the
Paintball Field. A true battle would be fought to determine which
editor was truly better. The teams were:
VI, VIM, ed
vs.
EMACS and other vile editors
Warriors wore a T-Shirt donated by O’Reilly Associates depicting
their allegiance. The teams were split up with TEAM VI having 41
players and TEAM EMACS having 39, a fairly even split. Three games
were fought to decide the victor (note that the word victor begins
with ‘VI’ 🙂 Each game was fought to elimination or until the time
limit ran out. Each editor zealot would be eliminated if he was
shot anywhere on the body.
In the first match, VI decimated EMACS having 21 survivors and
EMACS having none. The second game was equally bad, with VI having
17 survivors. Feeling really bad, the judges decided to handicap
the VI team by surrounding them with EMACS users. However the
judges didn’t know what VI or EMACS was so they just refered to
them as the ‘monkeys’ and ‘cows’ based on their respective O’Reilly
animal. The game began, and the ‘monkeys’ were yet again triumphant
with 11 survivors defeating the cows.
Decisively the winners, VI trumpeted their ‘VI’ctory.
This year the battle will happen again at this years Linux Expo
http://www.linuxexpo.org/events.html.
I’m positive that VI will win again not because I will be playing
on the VI team, but because EMACS sucks! 🙂 I guess you can tell
what team I will be on. Choose your editor wisely.