How to End a Conversation at a Party: Mention the Editor Wars
Description
A popular meme set at a house party, where a group of young people are holding red plastic cups. The atmosphere is tense, with the woman in the foreground giving a look of sheer disgust and contempt. A text caption at the bottom reveals the cause of this reaction: someone has just said, '"vi is better than nano"'. The humor comes from injecting a fierce, niche technical debate into a casual social setting. 'vi' (and its successor, Vim) and 'nano' are two of the most common command-line text editors. The 'editor wars' are a long-standing tradition in the developer community, where programmers passionately argue for their preferred editor. Stating a preference, especially one for the notoriously complex 'vi' over the beginner-friendly 'nano', is presented here as a major social faux pas, comically out of place at a party, leading to the palpable cringe from everyone in the room
Comments
29Comment deleted
The most controversial thing you can say at a tech party isn't about politics, it's 'I just use nano because I still can't remember how to exit vim.' It's a filter for who you want to talk to for the rest of the night
Nothing empties a living room faster than an unsolicited ':set nospell' manifesto
The only thing more divisive than bringing up vi vs nano at a party is mentioning you actually configured your .vimrc from scratch and now use it as your IDE with 47 plugins, effectively turning a 50KB editor into a 2GB Electron app competitor
Bold of someone to start the vi vs nano war at a party - everyone knows you can't exit either the argument or the editor
The real controversy isn't vi vs nano - it's that someone at this party actually brought up text editors instead of arguing about tabs vs spaces, and somehow everyone's still listening. Though let's be honest, the person who said this probably spent the next 20 minutes explaining how to exit vim while everyone else quietly switched to nano for their crontab edits
Vi: modal mastery since '73, no menus needed. Nano: Ctrl+X for devs who still read the footer
Say “vi is better than nano” at a party and you’ve implemented zero‑config service discovery for engineers - the vim crowd replies :wq while ops reminds you nano isn’t in half our BusyBox pods
At 3am with packet loss and sudoers locked down, 'which vi || which nano' is the only philosophy that matters
*emacs has entered the chat* Comment deleted
EMACS Comment deleted
Good luck running kate on Cisco router Comment deleted
…do they not have ftp or something? Comment deleted
They do have ftp, in fact it's tied to the same flash drive which you can use to store and edit files with vi. The point is you might not have any other access than console/ssh Comment deleted
if you have ftp, you can use kate Comment deleted
The other point is that text editors are useless on Cisco routers Comment deleted
I guess at this time guy understand he not has friends. Comment deleted
Same as holy wars about editors Comment deleted
jokes aside, since I switched to neovim I can't go back to anything else, it's just perfect for me Comment deleted
What kind of language are you usually working with neovim? I am thinking a time to learn coding with similar vim-type terminal. Comment deleted
I mostly use java, python and c++, looking forward to learning go and rust soon Comment deleted
Thanks for the reply! I may try neovim too. Comment deleted
the learning curve is really steep and you might need to play a little bit with some plugins but trust me, it's worth it Comment deleted
Thanks for the encouragement! 👍🏼 I am happy to learn something cool. Comment deleted
Vscode > everything else, fight me Comment deleted
Vscode remote plugin is really cool though! Comment deleted
You guys are so cool. I still need to use mouse to code. 💩 Comment deleted
acme gang rise uo Comment deleted
🙌 Comment deleted
Atleast say emacs. Nano is not even in the same league. Comment deleted