“Vi Or Emacs”: Darby’s A Murder At The End Of The World Hacker Debate Trick Explained

Warning! This article contains spoilers for A Murder At The End Of The World.

Darby asks Sian whether she uses “Vi or Emacs” in A Murder at the End of the World‘s episode 4 to test her hacking knowledge, but what does her question really mean? After Rohan’s death in A Murder at the End of the World‘s episode 3, nearly everyone at the central retreat seems like a suspect. Fearing how the murders at the retreat could taint his reputation, Andy Ronson puts the hotel on lockdown and orders all guests to stay locked in their rooms.

After returning to her room, Darby anxiously wonders who the killer could be and cannot help but suspect everyone at the retreat. Owing to this, when Sian shows up at her balcony door and claims that she was wrong about not trusting her, Darby cleverly asks her, “Vi or Emacs?” to test her hacking knowledge. Although Sian’s response assures Darby she is on her side, Darby’s question leaves one curious about what Vi and Emacs could mean and how they helped her determine Sian’s motives.

The Real-Life Hacker “War” Between Vi & Emacs: Software Differences & Debate Explained

Darby asks Sian whether she uses Vi (also called Vim) or Emacs because both are the most popular text editors hackers use. The debate about which text editor is superior has been going on for decades, making their rivalry an essential part of hacker culture. Since Darby, too, is a hacker in A Murder at the End of the World, she is well aware that nearly all hackers would use one of the two text editors or would at least know about them. However, when Darby asks Sian which one she uses to confirm if she is a hacker, Sian seems clueless about what she is talking about, significantly reducing the odds of her being a hacker.

Could Sian Still Be The Killer (Despite Darby’s Hacker Trick)?

Although Darby uses an intelligent trick to determine whether Sian is a hacker, Sian might still be the central killer who hacked Rohan’s pacemaker. A Murder at the End of the World presents Sian as a former doctor who later became an astronaut. Her career path reveals that she is intelligent and might have been quick-witted enough to realize that Darby was testing her. It is also possible that Darby’s test suddenly caught her off-guard, and even though she knew about Vi and Emacs, she maintained her ignorant demeanor to convince Darby she knew nothing about hacking.

Sian’s behavior becomes even more suspicious when she later hacks into a car’s OBD terminal to start it. She justifies it by claiming that operating and understanding vehicle consoles was a part of her job as an astronaut, which makes sense because she might have trained with some other text editor. However, the fact that she claims that she has never even heard about Vi and Emacs despite knowing how to hack the OBD terminal raises the possibility of her being the main hacker and killer antagonist in A Murder at the End of the World‘s central retreat.