Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!iuvax!pur-ee!a.cs.uiuc.edu!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald From: mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: vi vs emacs in a student enviro Message-ID: <47800011@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 5 Jul 88 20:57:00 GMT References: <370@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> Lines: 26 Nf-ID: #R:umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU:370:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:47800011:000:1722 Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald Jul 5 15:57:00 1988 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, very badly so. (I am NOT considering the possibility of any customization- beacuse the context is that a person learning it can instantly use it on ANY system with it, without having someone else customize it. If they learn it well enough they can of course do customizing.) You just can't learn a few commands and expect to be really useful, because you will accidentally hit an unlearned key and get sucked off into never-never land. One important goal of designing a user interface for an editor should be that a single key or set of keys does one and only one thing. It shouldn't matter what "mode" one is in. This is seldom totally feasible, but at a minimum one should have a normal mode wherein ALL the normal printing keys inset themselves in the text, where all cursor keys work, where destructive forward and backward delete work, etc. Preferably it should also do delete by words and lines, undelete by whatever it deletes, page up and page down. Vi doesn't do this. Emacs does, and so do virtually every other editor I have used - EDT for the VAX, Wordstar, Wordperfect, and many others for the IBMPC. Now all the ones I mentioned do have a "command mode", emacs less so than the others, but is is seldom necessary to use it. If one sees a mistake nearby in the text, you can just hit a couple of cursor keys, go there and fix things, and come back, without changing modes. Vi doesn't 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.