vi vs emacs in a student enviro

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <16475 at brl-adm.ARPA> PAAAAAR%CALSTATE.BITNET at cunyvm.cuny.edu writes:
>Some people have mentioned the necessity of learning about 'ed'. I concur
> (1) it handles larger files on our system than the other editors
> (2) it is a neat tool for daemonic processes to use to alter files
> (3) it is an online introduction to regular expressions (sed,grep,awk..)

Re point (3): isn't it wonderful how many UNIX tools use regular
expressions: sh, csh, ed, sed, grep, egrep, awk, vi, ..., and it isn't
_so_ helpful that no two of them have the _same_ regular expression syntax.

Re point (1): eh?  What system is that?  On far too many UNIX systems I
have been forced to use 'ex' instead of 'ed' because the version of 'ed'
provided was still configured for PDP-11s.  I had formed the perhaps
erroneous impression that a lot of vendors didn't take ed seriously any
more.  (I'm talking about e.g. a machine with 8M of real memory where ed
was configured with an sbrk limit of 64k.)  I'm even used to
VIle/EXecrable giving up on files that aren't all that big.  Beware of
VIle/EXecrable with long lines:  it has a nasty habit of truncating
the data as well as the display.  Emacsen are generally a better bet.

Re point (2): ed is really meant to be interactive (the V.3 version will
even _prompt_ if you ask it nicely); for scripts and daemons you're
probably better off with sed (which is close enough to ed to get you
really confused when it's different).