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From: gast@lanai.cs.ucla.edu (David Gast)
Newsgroups: uk.misc,comp.editors
Subject: Re: MKS vi
Message-ID: <1990Nov12.064240.5651@cs.ucla.edu>
Date: 12 Nov 90 06:42:40 GMT
References: <90312.135743QQ11@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>
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In article <90312.135743QQ11@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK> QQ11@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK writes:
>Would anyone from an academic site (they tend to have less money :-))
>be willing to share their experiences of this product? Is it worth
>it compared to STEVIE for example? Is the support good? Is it a 100%
>clone?

In general MKS vi and the MKS toolkit in general are excellent.  The
toolkit includes the Korn Shell and the new version of awk.  Chances are
that your site does not have those.  On the other hand, the price has
risen significantly over the past couple years at the same time that
they introduced a version for that half an operating system.  Using
dos without the mks toolkit is like being in a stall without tp.
(You can do your work, but it is inconvenient and messy).

I have never used stevie, so I cannot comment on that aspect.  I have
found the support to be acceptable to excellent, but I have never called
them up and asked "how do I do X?"  There are a few minor differences,
at least with the version of vi I am used to.

1) With mks vi using a function key resets dot.  I prefer that dot not be
   reset, but perhaps it was a bug that dot was not reset.

2) There is a known bug with many versions of vi in that "d}" saves 3 copies
   into the numbered buffers.  (It should only save one copy).  mks vi does
   not have this bug. 

3) There may be other bug/feature fixes as well.  I don't have a list.

4) One trouble I always have with dos is that I invariably hit the backspace
   key instead of the delete key.  With mks vi I tried 
	:map ^H ^V^?
   but when I then typed backspace, disaster resulted.  With my the vi I
   normally use, there is no such problem.

Other than those comments mentioned above, I can think of no differences
off the top of my head.  It even supports ^Z.

David Gast
gast@cs.ucla.edu
{uunet,ucbvax,rutgers}!{ucla-cs,cs.ucla.edu}!gast