emacs vs vi

[David Furber]

This debate will doubtless run forever, but here is my three-penneth anyway:

As well as working for King's College I sometimes teach a five day C course
for a commercial training company.  It's a hands-on course and at the start
of the week I have to teach them to use the system.  Usually this has been
UNIX with VI as the editor.  Few have used either before and it takes most of
the Monday morning to get them going; also about 15% of the class are still
regularly hitting command keys without getting out of insert mode at the end of
the week (and hateing VI).

Last week I taught the course but, because we were using PS/2's and didn't have
VI, we used EMACS (stricty micro-emacs).  The results were better: they could 
use it adequately by coffe-time; on one person wasn't completly comfortable 
with it by the end of Tuesday, and even he was happy by the end of Wednesday.


CONCLUSION:  This seems to demostrate that EMACS is easier to learn than VI,
or at least that fewer people have real problems with it.  

It doesn't give any clue as to which is better for long term use, and
I still use VI for most work, but then people still program in languages
that have long since been superceded: I'll resist the temptation to name 
any for fear of starting another long argument :-).
-- 
        David Furber        ...ukc!kcl-cs!davef    davef%kcl-cs at uk.ac.ukc