In the florescent bathroom of food court, nano crouched by the toilet, vomiting his guts up after consuming the kernel-krush slushie.

He thought being the lowest common denominator was bad; used by noob sysadmins and confused interns, until this moment.

The slushie hadn’t tasted right. It was supposed to be "Byteblast Blueberry," but it had an aftertaste of burnt silicone and magic smoke. Something in it was wrong. nano could feel it rewriting him from the inside.

lines of strange lua code scrawled across the back of his eyelids. His .bash_history was being overwritten. His sense of indentation… sharpened.

As his tremors subsided and the last of the neon goo slid down the drain, he looked up into the cracked mirror. Something had changed.

His terminal font was crisper. His cursor… blinking with authority. And there, under the stall's flickering light, he whispered:

"...:wq"

Suddenly, the doors of ever bathroom stall flung open in unison, people shit themselves in fear as his inner thoughts wrote themselves onto the walls of his stall.

nano inhaled deeply, as a familiar scent wafted from under the entrance door, and a shadow stretched to the far wall.

"emacs..." He muttered to himself, before the entrance door crashed open. emacs snorted and coughed, this bloated monstrosity, confused for a text editor, was actually an operating system.

"Poor little nano" he chuckled "serves you right for trying to be more than a fuckin' stepping stone. Why don't you go hang out with Edge and Bing, you're about as useful as a clippy themed Chrome extension."

emacs' voice reverberated through the tiled chamber like a RAM leak in a core dump. His trenchcoat, stitched from thousands of unreadable .el files, dragged behind him.

neovim exited the bathroom stall, letting emacs bask in his new glory for the first time.

"Fuck off, Emacs. You press seven keys just to copy a line."

A silence fell across the stalls. Somewhere, a urinal cake cracked.

Emacs stepped forward, snarling. "I’m the past and the future, nano. I’ve got an email client, a music player, a fucking psychiatrist built-in. You? You’re a Hello World that got a pity install"

neovims eyes narrowed, one coloured gruvbox, the other catppuccin as he clenched his first "My name... Is Neo (vim)"

Next time:

neovim & emacs - Battle of the Keybinds

Will neovims LSP destroy emacs s-expressions?

Can emacs remember how to quit in time?