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From: chapman@miro.berkeley.edu (Brent Chapman)
Newsgroups: net.college,net.cse
Subject: Re: Student-friendly editor query
Message-ID: <12281@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sun, 9-Mar-86 05:27:01 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.12281
Posted: Sun Mar  9 05:27:01 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Mar-86 01:37:44 EST
References: <184@moncol.UUCP> <121@andromeda.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: chapman@miro.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Brent Chapman)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 28
Xref: watmath net.college:1211 net.cse:724

In article <121@andromeda.UUCP> marco@andromeda.UUCP (the wharf rat) writes:
>In article <184@moncol.UUCP>, john@moncol.UUCP (John Ruschmeyer) writes:
>> 
>> What editor do you use/recommend for use by students? Are there editors for
>> UNIX which are "friendlier", particularly to novices?
>> 
>      I think vi is a very friendly editor, but we use emacs a lot
>here. emacs has the advantage of being the same on many systems,
>as well as neat windowing and macros.
>
>                                                    W.rat
EMACS also has the disadvantage of being very cpu and memory intensive
as well.  If your hardware situation is typical (too many students
and too few resources), you may not want a really neat program that
will bog down the system, when a less full-featured, but still very
good editor (like vi) won't cause such a load.  Most students in an
intro class would not use most of the features of EMACS, anyway.

I don't use EMACS myself, so I can't comment on its ease of use
or its features first-hand.  I have seen demonstrations (by a friend
of mine who is a manager for several of our undergraduate machines
here at Berkeley) of what EMACS can do to a system.  It's impressive,
if you have the capacity to spare.


Brent Chapman
chapman@miro.berkeley.edu
ucbvax!miro!chapman