TAOUP had a chapter "a tale of 5 editors" discussing emacs, vi, and more, and does point out emacs is an outlier (and outsider) to many unix principles. It doe

TAOUP had a chapter "a tale of 5 editors" discussing emacs, vi, and more, and does point out emacs is an outlier (and outsider) to many unix principles. It does quote Doug McIlroy speaking against it (but also against vi?). It attempts to generalize from discussing "The Right Size for an Editor" question to discussing how to think about "The Right Size of Software". I don't know if it's possible to have impartially "fair" discussion of editors. Skimming now, I can see how vi lovers would hate some characterizations there. But it does try to learn interesting lessons from them. It does NOT simply equate "Emacs has UNIX nature" so you can't just prove something like "TAOUP mentions Emacs, Emacs is GNU, Gnu is Not Unix => TAOUP is not UNIX, QED" ;-) http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch13s02.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch13s02.html bias disclaimers: I learnt most of what I know of unix from within Emacs, which I still use ~20 years later. I learnt more from Info pages than man pages (AIX had pretty bad man pages). I suspect you have a different picture of unix than I. And I now know better than arguing which editor is better ;) But I found TAOUP articulated ideas I only learnt through osmosis. I'm looking forward to reading a better articulation if you know one.