Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!haven!adm!cmcl2!lanl!dph
From: dph@lanl.gov (David Huelsbeck)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: stuff
Message-ID: <11744@lanl.gov>
Date: 9 Apr 89 18:54:55 GMT
References: <519@TSfR.UUCP>
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 79

I know I shouldn't, but that's never stopped me before...

From article <519@TSfR.UUCP>, by usenet@TSfR.UUCP (usenet):
> Via, ah, subprocesses?  If emacs forks off a subprocess to read the
> news, it doesn't get charged for the time spent in those processes.
> If your emacs _is_ getting charged for that time, you'd better bitch
> at your system administrator, because something is rotten in the
> state of Denmark.

Obviously you haven't seen any of these things in action.
Reading news or mail in Emacs is a lot different than doing
a ':!rn' or ':!mail' in vi.  The amount of processing done 
by non-emacs subprocesses is minimal.

I wouldn't want to bitch at my sys admin anyway.  Even if she does
use vi.

> 
> It's not really relevant, but it's very easy to do compiles from inside
> vi.  :!make will do the job just fine, for instance.
> 

That depends on how you define 'the job'.  If the job is to run
make then you are correct that both editors do the job just fine.
However, if you'd like to have a record of the make stored in an
editor buffer where you are free to browse it and perhaps copy 
the information to some other buffer, or if you'd like the editor
to parse the error and warning messages and move you to the point
in your program where the first one was detected I think vi's 
going to come up a bit short.

You may say "But Dave, I don't want my editor to do any of that."
Fine.  I work with a person who doesn't want her editor to allow
her to move around with her cursor.  She likes line editors.  Fine.
She doesn't complain about those of us who do.  I don't recall 
that she's ever claimed that our editors were wasting cpu time.
I'll bet vi uses more cpu than ed.  Obviously ed is the superior
product.  No problems with long screen updates over slow phone
lines.  It's even got command mode and input mode just the way
you like it!

>>... It [sic] likely that emacs
>>gets a distribution of users that's weighted more towards the
>>power-user end of the spectrum.

Well, emacs has a spelling checker but not a grammer checker.  Anybody
thought of writing grammer.el?  Obviously though you are of superior
intellect and quickly detected my horrible typo which was undoubtedly
caused by the poor ergonomic features of my brain dead editor.  That'll
teach me to use emacs.

> 
> Ahh, [sic] this is obviously some strange usage of the phrase `power user' 
> that
> I was not previously aware of.
> 


My basis for that statment was that emacs provides a number of features
that are only of use if your editing demands are rather great.  People
writing 200 line pascal programs would have little use for windows,
multiple buffers or the 'M-x compile' command.  However when dealing 
larger, multiple source file program development these features become
more attractive.  So for a beginner there is no real reason to use one
over the other.  For a more advanced (power) user there may be.


Also most intro to unix books go on at length about vi while never
mentioning emacs.  I know vi is standard and emacs isn't so the reason
for this is obvious.  I suspect that most people learn vi first
and emacs second.  This is perhaps the way it ought to be.  Every unix
user ought to be proficient enough in ed and vi to edit what ever they
might need to edit.  There are times when this comes in handy.  If need
be I can do long division but I'd rather use a calculator when I can.

>    -david parsons
>    -orc@pell.uucp

-dph