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From: reid%Glacier@sri-unix.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Editor usage
Message-ID: <13382@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 6-Nov-83 11:09:46 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.13382
Posted: Sun Nov  6 11:09:46 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 8-Nov-83 21:52:18 EST
Lines: 26

From:  Brian Reid <reid@Glacier>

Here at Stanford we have about a dozen Unix VAXen, and each of them has a
"most popular" editor. If the system managers came from a VI
background, then VI is the dominant editor; if the system managers came
from a Rand background, then Rand is the dominant editor. 10 of our 12
VAXen have Gosling (of course) Emacs as the dominant editor; on most of
these systems it is rare to see, ever, a person using any other editor.
Our 1 VMS system has about 50% of the users using Emacs.

I listen with disbelief to hackers who claim that Emacs is unlearnable.
Stanford secretaries and full professors manage to learn it easily,
from the documentation and online tutorials, in a minimal amount of
time. Any editor is harder to learn if you have preconceived notions of
what editors are supposed to do, of course, and anything that you don't
want to learn will be hard to learn, so if you sit down at the Emacs
documentation prepared to find it inadequate, you will find it
inadequate.

We are all amused by CCA Emacs and by the eager attempts of its author
to use this forum to convince people that he has scientific evidence
of its superiority to Gosling's Emacs, but "nobody uses it." We're
much harder to fool out here living next to the San Andreas Fault.....

	Brian Reid
	Stanford