Editors

Periodically the question of which editor to use for TEI tasks arises on the TEI mailing list. There is no single answer to this question, but this page attempts to help you frame the question correctly.

Before thinking about an editor, you should think about who is going to be using it, how often, for what and where.

Those from a technical background are already likely to have a preferred programmable editor. Those from a non-technical background are likely to be more interested in ease of use. Occasional or temporary users are going to what a program that works as similarly as possible to the other applications they use, whereas full-time permanent users are more likely to get a benefit from more powerful editor, even if it has a learning curve. Projects which use large XML files need to be aware that some editors struggle with large XML files. The sed editor (see below) is a special case, allowing for truly arbitrary sizes. Users who need to edit files directly on remote servers may need vt100-capable editors (emacs, vi, sed, etc).

The following table is sorted by four keys:
 * 1) Decreasing Beginner-friendliness
 * 2) Explicit support for TEI or not
 * 3) Explicit support for XML or not
 * 4) No information available

Humour
Tension between emacs and vi users is longstanding and well summarised on the Editor war Wikipedia page. vi was included in the POSIX standard, whereas emacs was not, perhaps because vi was historically available in multiple implementations from multiple vendors. The following cartoon illustrates the commonly-held assumptions that emacs and vi are very powerful but obscure while their competitors make users do all the work.