Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!enea!sommar
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: EMACS better than Vi?
Message-ID: <3242@enea.se>
Date: 7 May 88 11:38:18 GMT
Organization: ENEA DATA AB, Sweden
Lines: 51

Scott Fowser (fowser@vax1.acs.udel.EDU) 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.

Yippee! Another editor war, love it! :-) Seriously, dont be ashamed
if you prefer Vi in favour of any other editor. Since you ask for
it, I will try to explain why I use Emacs, when being on a Unix system.
To do this I have to give some of my background. I am raised on
VMS, which I still prefer. The editor I was taught - this was at the
university - was a very simple screen editor of local origin, called
TEVE. Taking in regard the ambition put into it, it was very a good editor. 
  Anyway, when I started to program bigger things, I grew out of TEVE 
and started to use EDT, the standard editor of VMS at the time. But,
yet the smallness of TEVE, there were several central features I missed
in EDT as other things I disliked. Also, I tended to search for the  
functions on the TEVE keys. Now, EDT offers you a possibility to 
redefine keys, and I took benefit from this. As far I could I emulated
the TEVE keys and I took away the worst insanities from EDT. As time
passed I got an EDTINI with over 60 lines. (And one key = one line.)
  When Unix came in my way, I knew about Emacs and decided that I 
should emulate my personal EDT in it. Of course Emacs is much more 
powerful than EDT, and Emacs also allowed me to get nearer to the 
TEVE concept.
  Since then I have also implemented my EDT profile in TPU, the new
VMS editor, programmable like Emacs, but quite different. For me
TPU provided better tools get what *I* wanted, but that's another 
story.

So I use Emacs to get the functions I want, and where I want them. 
Many of the advanced functions (abbreviations, windows, electric modes,
process handling) do I not use at all.

So if you feel used to Vi, and are not interested in the advanced features 
of Emacs, there is no reason for you to change. Particulary not, if you  
do all your work on Unix. And, if you want the hot stuff in Emacs, you 
can write your own profile with vi-like bindings, or get it from the
net somewhere.

Case closed? Not really. I'd like to put in an Emacs flame, before I
end. Emacs is powerful, etc, etc. BUT MUST IT BE SO GODDAMM SLOW?
It has really neat screen updating, but must the response time for
some single characters be 2-3 seconds? Oh, no this not always happen,
but as soon the system load increases, it does. It's like batch-
oriented editing. You type a bunch of keys, you wait a while and then 
you get the result. It's a real pain. 
-- 
Erland Sommarskog        "No protection on a motor-bike, then
ENEA Data, Stockholm      Sooner or later, that normal traffic's gonna get you"
sommar@enea.UUCP          -- Peter Hammill