vi vs emacs in a student enviro

David Dyer-Bennet ddb at ns.ns.com
Wed Jul 13 07:54:10 AEST 1988


In article <1045 at ficc.UUCP>, peter at ficc.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
> ...and the overloading of
> non-printable characters is a royal pain [in emacs]... 
  Depends what you edit.  I insert non-printing characters other than space
and return often enough to remember how to quote, and use it several times
a month.

> ...but the regular expression capabilities almost
> makes up for it. [in vi]
  VI regular expressions are essentially identical to Gnu emacs or Epsilon
regular expressions, near as I can tell.

> The ^U convention for counts in Emacs is nice, but it'd be cleaner
> to cons up counts out of ALT-0 through ALT-9. 
  The Emacs I've used do this.  Also Alt--, don't forget negative args.

> Search commands should
> be (as in VI) actually part of the range-specifier (search with alt-/).
  I find it easier to define a range by actually going to the limits
of it, so I can be sure they're where I thought they were.  Then having
defined a region, it's easy to apply a command to a range.  I don't like
the way VI does it, it's too dangerous.  Besides, most searches are for things
I want to look at, not things I want to do something too.

-- 
	-- David Dyer-Bennet
	...!{rutgers!dayton | amdahl!ems | uunet!rosevax}!umn-cs!ns!ddb
	ddb at viper.Lynx.MN.Org, ...{amdahl,hpda}!bungia!viper!ddb
	Fidonet 1:282/341.0, (612) 721-8967 hst/2400/1200/300



More information about the Comp.unix.questions mailing list