I would love to get into a lengthy discussion about why the One True Editor is superior to vi, but I have a feeling that it would just degenerate into a flame w

I would love to get into a lengthy discussion about why the One True Editor is superior to vi, but I have a feeling that it would just degenerate into a flame war. vi does have an advantage in that it comes standard on most unix servers, while emacs requires a long (but relatively painless) install. Let's just say that in terms of power the two are about equal. I think emacs has an edge in the macros/functions department but vi isn't far behind. It's probably also fair to say that either one of them are probably better than a Windows based IDE if you're working with open source software (ruby, php, perl etc).