Vile (text editor)

vile is a text editor that combines aspects of the Emacs and vi editors. These editors are traditionally located on opposing sides of the editor wars, as users of either tend to have strong sentiments against the editor they do not use. vile attempts to reconcile these positions.

vile is an acronym which stands for "VI Like Emacs". vile 9.6 is featured in Chapter 18 of the O'Reilly book "Learning the vi and Vim Editors". An older version (vile 8.0) was presented in Chapter 12 of the O'Reilly book "Learning the vi Editor".

The program is also known as xvile for the X Window System, and as winvile for Microsoft Windows.

vile was created and originally maintained by Paul Fox. In 1996, maintenance was taken over by Thomas Dickey, who had provided many major contributions to the codebase over the preceding years.