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From: DU>@brl-smoke.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: editor wars ad infinitum... [FLAME]
Message-ID: <4154@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 25-Sep-86 17:15:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.4154
Posted: Thu Sep 25 17:15:35 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 30-Sep-86 19:16:04 EDT
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I apologize in advance. I missed the original, otherwise I would have
sent mail to the original author. But I can't let this pass as is....

> I don't understand why vi has such a bad rep. The keys are mnemonic,
> which is more than I can say for emacs.

Huh? Please explain hjkl for up/down/left/right. Mnemonic, my ass!
At least emacs has Contrl-[{F}orward,{B}ackward,{P}revious,{N}ext].

The rest of the command set is about the same. Meta-<char> does a
bigger version of Contrl-<char>. Contrl-e{X}tended commands do things
like {F}indfile, {S}avefile, etc. No worse than ":e" or ":w".

I've taught secretaries to use Emacs before. No problem. You teach
them a basic command set, and they get by just fine. Some even start
investigating the OTHER things that Emacs can do. And of course, the
online help in Emacs is much better than that in vi.

[End of Flame.]

The mnemonicity of the command set is actually irrelevant, unless it's
an editor you use only once in a great while. In which case, you
probably want a mouse anyway. If you use an editor regularly, your
fingers learn the right sequences to type to make things happen.

This is why function keys, or any other key which doesn't have a place
on a Selectric keyboard, are bad things to use. They move as you go
from one keyboard to another. But it's VERY hard to build an editor
that doesn't use at least some of those characters.

And the above two things are good reasons for doing what I suggested
before - choose the software you want to use, then buy hardware that
it runs well on.

As for mouse vs. keyboard, why not get both? That way, you've got nice
features, if not the best, of both worlds [I'd still like to do
drag-select in Emacs :-].  If you've got a well-designed editor,
adding mouse support should be straightforward.  For instance, GNU
Emacs has a mouse interface for Suntools and X, and microGNU on the
Amiga has a mouse interface. Hasn't someone done that for vi and it's
micro-based clones?

	<mike