I just thought I'd point out some of the problems of the "holy wars": First, it is very rare that one person carefully tests all of the options so that he can make a well-informed comparison. It's a lot of work. So who really knows what is better for which purpose? If there is an argument, there may be some validity on both sides. Second, I find that many false claims are made in these battles over what is best. I think this is because most proponents of a certain program know it very well and they don't know the competitors as well. So they'll say things like ProgramX can do foo, but ProgramY cannot, and they'll be wrong. I've seen this with emacs/vi and with bash/tcsh. Thirdly, if you want to look at who uses which software to see if the software is better suited for certain kinds of jobs, you again run into some problems. It seems like some people here are saying that programmers use emacs more than vi and other people are saying that programmers use vi more than emacs. It could be that these differing reports are coming from people who worked with different groups of programmers. What is the relationship of the age of the programmer to his choice of editor? I would guess that older programmers would be more likely to use emacs instead of vi because when they started programming, emacs was the most popular choice (or they switched to it from something a lot worse). You might also find that programmers who worked in certain places, studied in certain disciplines, or lived in certain countries have certain software preferences. Mike