vi vs. emacs

Michael A. Petonic mikep at ism780c.isc.com
Sun Jul 31 18:01:15 AEST 1988


In article <16697 at brl-adm.ARPA> garvin at uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Jay Garvin) writes:
 >P.S.    Ok, I'll go along with things like vi's
 >
 >		"ayL (Double-Quote-Small-a-Small-y-Capital-L) means:
 >		*Yank text from  cursor to end  of screen  into buffer "a"*

Well, doing the same in GNU Emacs is as easy as:
	^[>^Xxa (Escape, right-angle-bracket, Control-X, x, a)

And while we're on the point of stuffing things in buffers, GNU Emacs has
a more comfortable way, in my opinion, than VI does.  In order to "yank"
a section of text that spans multiple screens, you just go to the top
and then bottom and you can actually see the text around where you're
going to yank from.  In VI, you have to manually count lines or go
through the trouble of setting an extraneous mark and then yank until
a mark.  Pretty bogus.  Goes along the same lines as a vehement 
advocate of the goto-less programming school of thought.  ``Look,
I didn't use a SINGLE GOTO!  Sure, I had to use a couple extraneous
booleans [ because, of course, the goto-less advocate programs
exclusively in Pascal. ], but no GOTOS''

-MikeP



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