vi vs emacs in a student environment

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <6056 at megaron.arizona.edu> lm at megaron.arizona.edu (Larry McVoy) writes:
>As a consultant I'll volunteer the following advice:  don't get people used to
>emacs.  Please.  Why?  Because emacs is available on "some" unix machines.  
>Vi is available on almost all unix machines.  Old habits die hard, so I think
>it's better to start people out with something they can stay with...

If "vi" weren't such a crappy editor this might be good advice.
However, many users spend much of their time text-editing, so they
should use the best editor available rather than suffer with inferior
tools just because they are more universal.  (If they really have to
deal with a wide variety of UNIX systems, then it makes more sense to
emphasize universality.  It would also make sense in that case to
provide better tools on all those systems.)

I actually do use "vi" on my Sun, until I get "sam" running.  (The
SunTools text editor is a joke.)  Given a choice between "vi" or an
EMACS variant I'll choose EMACS, but those aren't the only choices.