vi vs emacs in a student enviro

[terryl at tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM]

In article <3d1d2b9f.d8e9 at apollo.uucp> gallen at diskless.UUCP (Gary Allen) writes:
>I guess my favorite
>so far has been EDT but that generally requires VMS (The last place had a
>reasonable facsimile on UNIX) for which I have even less use.


      OHHHH, YYYUUUCCCKKKK!!! I was going to stay out of this discussion,
editors being one of the things you never talk about (like religion & politics)
because all of the discussions have the same fervored(sp?) pitch of one of
those tele-evangelists, but I couldn't let the comment about EDT go by with-
out voicing my disapproval.

	***NOTE***

     I used EDT on a VMS 1.6 system (i.e. MANY, MANY moons ago), so what I
say may not be true now, but it certainly was back then.

     What was the worse thing about EDT I remember??? Well, it was a line-
oriented editor, and to do a simple substitution one typed:

	s<ESC>pattern<ESC>new-pattern<CR>

where <ESC> is what you think (i.e. 033 ASCII), pattern was the pattern you
wanted to change, and new-pattern was what you wanted it changed to. Now, it
wasn't the idea of using <ESC> as a separator (actually, I kinda like the
idea of using a non-printable character as the separator), but the fact that
once you typed the <ESC>, you were committed to filling out the rest of the
line. What's even worse, you couldn't back up (i.e. erase) the <ESC>. Wait,
there was something even worse than that; if EDT couldn't find the pattern
on the current line, it would search from the current line till the end of
file looking for pattern, and would change pattern to new-pattern if found.
So, once you typed the second <ESC>, unless you were VEWWY, VEWWY careful
(said in my best Elmer Fudd voice), you could be very, very up the proverbial
creek without a paddle. EDT definitely violated the principle of least sur-
prise.

     The second worse thing I remember about EDT was that once you were in
it, ALL lines were numbered, and there was no way to defeat this FEATURE.
When you inserted lines, what it would do is take the line numbers of the
lines you were inserting between and AVERAGE them, and then start numbering
the new lines with this average, with an increment of some choosing(fortunately
there were ways to tell EDT what increment to use). Now, the side effect of
this scheme is that sooner or later, you'll add enough lines to hit the number
of the line your inserting before, and then EDT will drop you back into
command mode automatically. If you're lucky enough, you'll just have to go
into insert mode again and start adding lines, but sooner or later you won't
be able to do that (the reason is that the line numbers of the two lines you
want to insert between will have consecutive numbers). Once this happens,
you have to re-number ALL of the lines in the file (there was no capability
to re-number parts of the file). Gads, how I hated EDT!!!