vi vs emacs in a student enviro

[Gary Allen]

In article <47800011 at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>I just have to say something about the vi vs. good editors debate.
>Vi is an ergonomic disaster area. Its basic problem is that it is modal,
[...Mucho deleto...]
>seem to do that. I feel it would be better to teach a better editor than
>vi. Emacs is certainly complicated, and might not be the answer, but
>there HAS to be something better than vi.

This about sums it up for me. I dislike both (although vi a bit more) because
of the amount of stuff that has to be remembered. I expect an editor to do
just a couple of things, move left, right, up, down, and insert a character.
Above that I really don't care. I really hate all the shift-hyper-meta-super-
cali-ctrl-fragilistic of emacs, although it's generally unnecessary until I
hit the wrong ctrl-character and wind up in hyper-space. I guess my favorite
so far has been EDT but that generally requires VMS (The last place had a
reasonable facsimile on UNIX) for which I have even less use.

A good rule of thumb that I use in weighing editors is just to weigh the
documentation (but then, I guess vi would win, huh? :-)). Anything that
won't fit on a 3x5 card represents the over-active imagination of its
author.

Gary Allen
Apollo Computer
Chelmsford, Ma
{decvax,yale,umix}!apollo!gallen