.Aside
.X "The New Hackers' Dictionary"
I'm sticking my neck out here.  Holy wars have been fought about the differences
between \fIvi\fP\| and \fIEmacs\fP, and they continue to be fought.  To quote
version 4.0 of Eric Raymond's \fIThe New Hackers' Dictionary\fP\|:
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.ft I
\fBholy wars\fP /n./ [from {Usenet}, but may predate it] /n./ {flame war}s over
{religious issues}.  The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms
{big-endian} and {little-endian} in connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first
controversy was entitled "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace".  Other perennial
Holy Wars have included {EMACS} vs. {vi}, my personal computer vs. everyone
else's personal computer, {{ITS}} vs. {{Unix}}, {{Unix}} vs. {VMS}, {BSD} Unix
vs. {USG Unix}, {C} vs. {{Pascal}}, {C} vs.  FORTRAN, etc., ad nauseam.  The
characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is
that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off
personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical
evaluations.  See also {theology}.
.P
:EMACS: /ee'maks/ /n./ [from Editing MACroS] The ne plus ultra of hacker
editors, a programmable text editor with an entire LISP system inside it.  It
was originally written by Richard Stallman in {TECO} under {{ITS}} at the MIT AI
lab; AI Memo 554 described it as "an advanced, self-documenting, customizable,
extensible real-time display editor".  It has since been reimplemented any
number of times, by various hackers, and versions exist that run under most
major operating systems.  Perhaps the most widely used version, also written by
Stallman and now called "{GNU} EMACS" or {GNUMACS}, runs principally under Unix.
It includes facilities to run compilation subprocesses and send and receive
mail; many hackers spend up to 80% of their {tube time} inside it.  Other
variants include {GOSMACS}, CCA EMACS, UniPress EMACS, Montgomery EMACS, jove,
epsilon, and MicroEMACS.

Some EMACS versions running under window managers iconify as an overflowing
kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature the editor does not (yet)
include.  Indeed, some hackers find EMACS too {heavyweight} and {baroque} for
their taste, and expand the name as `Escape Meta Alt Control Shift' to spoof its
heavy reliance on keystrokes decorated with {bucky bits}.  Other spoof
expansions include `Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping', `Eventually
`malloc()'s All Computer Storage', and `EMACS Makes A Computer Slow' (see
{{recursive acronym}}).  See also {vi}.
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.End-aside
