Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: vi vs emacs in a student environment Message-ID: <11418@steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 29 Jun 88 15:22:23 GMT References: <399@cantuar.UUCP> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 49 In article <399@cantuar.UUCP> paul@cantuar.UUCP (P. Ashton) writes: | We are in the middle of deciding which editor to teach students next | year, and are looking at vi and emacs. We have a couple of questions | | (i) we have heard emacs is somewhat resource hungry. What experiences do | people have with students using emacs with regard to resource use | (environment GNU emacs on a Vax 11/750 running 4.3BSD, and on sun 3/50s | and 3/60s). emacs is not monolithic, there are a number of flavors and styles. Certainly GNU emacs takes a great deal of memory, if not CPU. There are other flavors available, most commonly microemacs. While it doesn't contain a LISP compiler, most people don't really need that in their editor, nor mail reading, process control, interactive jokes, or any of the other stuff in GNU. GNU has many bells and whistles, and the LISP compiler is adequate for teaching a one semister LISP course, if desired. Microemacs will run on Ultrix, BSD, SunOS, Xenix, Cray2, MS-DOS, unix-pc, etc. It provides a full set of editing functions, windows, key redefinition, and a complete macro programming language for special key definitions. Size is about 78k on VAX, 120k on PC (with all features enabled). There is a MicroGNU emacs (now called mg) which seems to have some of the features of GNU. I haven't really tried it, but it is on several of the Suns at this site, due to problems running full GNU on machines with only 8 MB of memory. | (ii) is vi available for VMS (if so what are the details)? As part of UNIX environment for VMS, from INteractive Systems and Wolongong. I have no addresses for those vendors, but we have their software on some of our VAXen at remote sites. | Please reply by email - I will post a summary. | | Paul Ashton. | | -- | Internet(ish): paul@cantuar.{uucp,nz} JANET/SPEARNET: p.ashton@nz.ac.canty | UUCP: ...!{watmath,munnari,mcvax,...!uunet!vuwcomp}!cantuar!paul | NZ Telecom: Office: +64 3 667 001 x6350 | NZ Post: University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me