Why use U* over VMS

[terryl at sail.LABS.TEK.COM]

In article <1990Oct30.035412.15523 at cbnewsk.att.com> linwood at cbnewsk.att.com (linwood.d.johnson) writes:
>   Oh yeah.   VMS has some great editors also.  I used to love using
>   the TPU mode of ed.  We used to call it EVE (Extensible Vax
>   Editor).  It was great.  You could define all of the
>   functions of the keyboard to be something; like whatever you
>   wanted it to be.  I found the editors in the world of UNIX to
>   be somewhat hostile when compared to EVE.  


     Yeah, a stupid (And I do mean STUPID) standard editor that forces one
to have line numbers while one is editing a file, and have said line numbers
stay static even if one is adding/deleting lines, and those line added MUST
not be out of the range of line numbers one is adding between, and having
such stupid default line numbers such that one could add at MOST one line
between two lines, and then forcibly going back into command mode (instead
of input line mode), and forcing the user to MANUALLY renumber all of the lines
in the d*mn file??? You call that a great editor??? Boy, I thought I had a
warped view of the world.....

     (To be fair, this was MANY, MANY moons ago on a VMS 1.6 system, if memory
serves me correctly, but gads how I hated EDIT!!! Luckily, it was somewhat
easy to change all of the default numbering schemes, but there was ABSOLUTELY
no way to defeat the line numbering scheme while in the editor, and every so
often you would find yourself forcibly thrown out of line input mode back into
command mode, where the only thing you could really do is a command to cause
all of the lines in the file to be renumbered....)