Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!hplabs!otter!pdc
From: pdc@otter.hple.hp.com (Damian Cugley)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: Is your editor manly enough to edit itself?
Message-ID: <2000003@otter.hple.hp.com>
Date: 16 Sep 88 19:12:30 GMT
References: <1414@spp2.UUCP>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK.
Lines: 42

In article <1414@spp2.UUCP> baur@spp2.UUCP (Steven L. Baur) writes:
>GNU-Emacs, the editor manly enough to edit itself.  Don't leave home without
>it.

eirik@tekcrl.TEK.COM (Eirik Fuller)			Sep 11, 1988
> According to this argument, you should be editing with adb :-)
> 
> This tidbit of info is certainly consistent with gnumacs' X icon, the
> bitmap of a kitchen sink. 

It doesn't take much to be able to edit binaries - 
	- don't do dumb things to `long lines'
	- don't do dumb things to `illegal characters'

Emacs doesn't do anything fancy in order to accommodate silly things like
editing executables; it just tries to avoid breaking for dumb reasons.

...........................................................................
> I'd rather have an editor that can edit gracefully and other programs
> that do other things, than one program that does everything but
> nothing particularly well.

What do you mean by `graceful'? (This is a genuine question.)  

I find Emacs' versatility useful when I'm trying to do things over the
LAN (using X) - `remsh thathost emacs -d thishost:0' allows me to do
almost anything apart from a few terminal-based programs.  The lack of a
`quick reference card' is a bonus as well *:-).

> I'm not explicitly saying I don't think GNU-emacs does anything well.
> In fact, I'm favorably impressed with its X mouse support.  I still
> prefer vi, though.

I thought vi's mouse support was pretty lousy - even simply pasting
more than N (N being POM-dependent) lines of text will cause vi to hang
under the windowing system I use here...

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against vi per se, I just prefer GNU
Emacs.  If only for ispell-buffer.

pdc
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