Decent Unix Editors!! (one man's opinion, anyway)

[Brian R. Smith]

In <T0XA4Y at xds13.ferranti.com> peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

>In article <CPETTERB.91Apr22112807 at mickey.glacier.sim.es.com> cpetterb at glacier.sim.es.com (Cary Petterborg) writes:
>> But DON'T say that emacs is not a decent program editor.  Emacs, by its
>> proven popularity is a decent program editor.  

>Popularity does not prove anything. MS-DOS is the most popular
>operating system in the world, judging by the number of users.

No, popularity alone doesn't say much.  But, vi comes with every unix
system, and MANY folks go through the trouble of replacing it with
emacs.  GNU emacs is more powerful, more flexible, and has "Zippy the
Pinhead" quotes...

>What you consider a good editor is a matter of taste and what you
>have programmed into your muscle memory.

Well, yes, that is true.  BUT, the standard emacs keys (the 8-10 keys
for cursor movement, delete-char, kill-line, etc.) are also found in
the Athena string widget, the Motif string widget, the Open Look
string widget, FrameMaker, tcsh, etc.  I don't know if emacs is the
cause of this consistency, but it is convenient.

If you HAVE to learn either vi or emacs, I'd say go for emacs.  I
haven't seen anything friendlier on a unix machine.

Just another $0.02 to heap on the pile...
--
Brian
brsmith at cs.umn.edu