Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!husc6!cmcl2!lanl!dph
From: dph@lanl.gov (David Huelsbeck)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: stuff
Message-ID: <11726@lanl.gov>
Date: 8 Apr 89 19:21:19 GMT
References: <1777@wpi.wpi.edu>
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 43

From article <1777@wpi.wpi.edu>, by jhallen@wpi.wpi.edu (Joseph H Allen):
> 
	[...]
> So assuming people do similer things with emacs and vi, 
>  emacs is about 3 times 

This is a very unlikely assumption unless the vast majority of your
emacs users are novice users.  How many of these people are using
emacs to read news and mail?  Are any of them using terminal emulation
mode to provide themselves pseudo-windows on vt100 like terminals?
God forbid you have somebody out there who likes to run hanoi with
nine rings a few times a day.  Even fairly simple and common
activities like 'M-x compile' would up the emacs figures a lot.  In a
university setting where far more users are in the
compile-run-edit-compile... mode than most places this sort of thing
would start to add up very quickly.  Since vi can't do any of this the
vi users would tend to spread their cpu usage around to other
utilities.  You're also assuming that the distribution of users that
chooses emacs is similar to that of vi users.  It likely that emacs
gets a distribution of users that's weighted more towards the
power-user end of the spectrum.


All speculation of course.  I really would expect emacs to be more cpu
intensive than vi.  After all, one would expect a Mercedes to use more
energy than a horse and buggy.  What's important is what you get out
for what you put in.


For a new but related topic: Why are people such pussys about editors?

I use emacs when I have the choice because it provideds features that
I like and use that are not available on any other editor on our
system.  If I did not have that choice I'd use vi and lots of other
things to make up for the lack of emacs.  Hopefully a window system
would be among them.  On one system I work on we have no screen
editors at all.  You just learn to live with it.  So what's all the
bitching about?  If you can't remember a few commands in whatever
editor you can't remember the commands in how do you remember your
password?  How do you remember several programming languages at one
time?

-dph