VI(1) vs. the world

Larry Campbell campbell at maynard.UUCP
Sun Oct 5 00:40:45 AEST 1986


All this talk of how wonderful and feature-rich vi is must be from
people who have never used EMACS.  All of the examples cited so far
could have been done more easily in EMACS.  Contrary to some earlier
statements, EMACS does have regular expression searches (at least the
two version of EMACS I use, Jove and Gosling's, have them).

What's more, vi completely lacks the following features I find
indispensable:

    -	multiple buffers and windows
    -	query replace
    -	keyboard macros
    -	online help (":!man vi" doesn't count)

I also dislike strongly vi's user interface, but that's not the point.
Even if it had an EMACS-like key binding set, it's lack of useful features
would still prevent me from using it.

The only use I can find for vi is editing the EMACS sources while I'm
porting them to a new machine.
-- 
Larry Campbell                             The Boston Software Works, Inc.
ARPA: campbell%maynard.uucp at harvard.ARPA   120 Fulton Street, Boston MA 02109
UUCP: {alliant,wjh12}!maynard!campbell     (617) 367-6846



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