Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!k.cc.purdue.edu!l.cc.purdue.edu!cik From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: vi vs emacs in a student enviro Summary: Not automatically renumbering is desirable Message-ID: <829@l.cc.purdue.edu> Date: 9 Jul 88 14:53:31 GMT References: <370@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> <47800011@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <2819@tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM> Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department Lines: 32 In article <2819@tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM>, terryl@tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM writes: > In article <3d1d2b9f.d8e9@apollo.uucp> gallen@diskless.UUCP (Gary Allen) writes: > >I guess my favorite > >so far has been EDT but that generally requires VMS (The last place had a > >reasonable facsimile on UNIX) for which I have even less use. ........... > The second worse thing I remember about EDT was that once you were in > it, ALL lines were numbered, and there was no way to defeat this FEATURE. > When you inserted lines, what it would do is take the line numbers of the > lines you were inserting between and AVERAGE them, and then start numbering > the new lines with this average, with an increment of some choosing(fortunately < there were ways to tell EDT what increment to use). Now, the side effect of < this scheme is that sooner or later, you'll add enough lines to hit the number < of the line your inserting before, and then EDT will drop you back into < command mode automatically. If you're lucky enough, you'll just have to go < into insert mode again and start adding lines, but sooner or later you won't < be able to do that (the reason is that the line numbers of the two lines you < want to insert between will have consecutive numbers). Once this happens, < you have to re-number ALL of the lines in the file (there was no capability < to re-number parts of the file). Gads, how I hated EDT!!! I wish I could have some such feature on the editors available. I find it extremely annoying to have line numbers changed in the editing process. With both vi and emacs, it is still true that all lines are numbered, but the numbers are constantly changing. Every insertion or deletion of a line now renumbers the entire file; is this any better than sometimes having to do so yourself? -- Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907 Phone: (317)494-6054 hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)