🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1197@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU> fowser@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Scott Fowser) writes:
>I am interested to know why so many people prefer EMACS to Vi.  I
>decided to try it out, but from what I see in the tutorial, it seems
>that most of the commands must be preceeded by a control or an escape.
>If this is the case, using EMACS sounds quite inconvenient.

I'ts a matter of what you're used to.  I  don't find my fingers moving
that far when I use emacs (as I am right now, entering this article.)
I find the modes of vi to be an irritation, although many vi users
like them.

> ... rather bizarre remapping of escape to K omitted ...

Now I'll admit that emacs suffers from a certain degree of obscurity,
but given the sort of thing that you described, I don't necessarily
think that vi is an improvement ...

>I assume EMACS must have some more advanced features that give it an
>advantage over vi in some situations, but the only ones I can see are
>windows and that it is free.  I would be interested in hearing the
>advantages of EMACS for just basic editing, since I am willing to
>switch to EMACS if it really is better.

Let's see ...
  1) availability.  emacs is present on many more computer systems
     than vi.  At work, I use VMS machines, UNIX machines, and Lisp
     machines, and I use essentially the same editor on all of them.
     Through my past three jobs, over the past 6 years, I've not had
     to learn a new editor.
  2) customizations -- if you're just after simple text editing, this
     may not be of interest to you.  An Emacs is generally written
     in lisp or a lisp-like language (there are exceptions to this,)
     and the user is permitted to write extensions to the editor and to
     remap the keys to different functions.  You can write a vi emulator
     in emacs if you want.
     Even if you don't want to customize, other users write packages for
     various emacs implementations and distribute them, and you can then
     add the extensions of others easily.
  3) modeless -- some of us hate modes.  Of course, others like them.  I
     suggest that a mode vs. modeless flame war could be really pointless,
     so let's not have one.

Now for some disadvantages:

  1) size -- some emacs implementations are quite large
  2) obscurity -- as I mentioned above, emacs is rather arcane in places.
     the learning curve is pretty nasty.  vi is no prize on this score,
     though.  vi does win a bit by having a degree of compatibility with
     the classical unix text editor.
-- 
Richard Welty               Phone H: 518-237-6307  W: 518-387-6346
    welty@ge-crd.ARPA       {rochester,philabs,uunet}!steinmetz!welty