Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!eecae!tank!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!m.cs.uiuc.edu!p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies
From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: UNIX needs a real text editor
Message-ID: <79700025@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 89 20:33:00 GMT
References: <222@imspw6.UUCP>
Lines: 36
Nf-ID: #R:imspw6.UUCP:222:p.cs.uiuc.edu:79700025:000:1713
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Mar 14 14:33:00 1989


Which editor is best?  Whichever you've learned.

I learned xed, MIT emacs, Gosling's emacs, vi, then gnuemacs.  Each
time I get a new emacs, I make it emulate the features I'm accustomed
to in the old emacs.  This way, I can take advantage of any emacs
without having to learn an entirely new editor.

You can argue about the things you enjoy most in your editor

 -- I like incremental search in emacs (easily added to vi)
 -- most emacs's are programmed to NEVER complain about huge
    files, huge lines, etc.  Some other editors are not as robust.
 -- I like using ESC-J to justify my paragraphs.  Someday
    I'm going to modify it to avoid justifying troff macros.
 -- I use 2 windows all the time in emacs.
 -- I occasionally run a shell in a window to record a session
 -- Emacs commands seem to operate on "words" more than on characters,
    as in vi.  Most of my documents are strings of words, and even
    sentences sometimes.  I understand that many vi documents are just
    strings of characters 8-).

The things I like about VI are

 -- I used to appreciate its incredible speed.  It can maintain
    the screen while using VERY FEW cpu cycles.  Unfortunately,
    this "feature" is rapidly becoming obsolete, with cray-1's
    on a chip being introduced every day.
 -- It's not a memory pig like emacs.
 -- It's upward compatible with ed and xed, two editors I used to
    use.  When the ed/xed users die, this will not be an advantage
 -- it is distributed free with most unix systems.  You can't
    beat this convenience.
 -- It is more faithful to the UNIX user-interface (*snicker*).
    vi would be a poor-man's editor on a non-unix system.
    emacs has much more capability "built in".