vi vs emacs in a student enviro

[Peter da Silva]

There does not exist a decent editor on UNIX, or for that matter any other
system I have ever used.

A full GNU Emacs certainly has the power, but the brain-dead command set
(unless you customise the hell out of it) and the overloading of
non-printable characters is a royal pain... particularly since no two Emacs
implementations match. The way Emacs redraws the screen is a total disgrace,
too.

VI has a decent command set (though it'd be better if the range commands
were prefix instead of postfix, so they could provide feedback), but the
modefulness is mildly irritating (however understandable it might be)
and the relentless line-orientation gives me the screaming meemies. The
macros are brain-dead, too, but the regular expression capabilities almost
makes up for it.

It shouldn't be too difficult to allow for one bit of out-of-band
information. I.E., use the parity bit to indicate "command" and tie
it to an ALT key... if the channel doesn't carry it, then map it into
ESCAPE like Emacs does: but don't have any non-altmode commands.
If possible, hide this in the terminal.

The ^U convention for counts in Emacs is nice, but it'd be cleaner
to cons up counts out of ALT-0 through ALT-9. Search commands should
be (as in VI) actually part of the range-specifier (search with alt-/).
This would cut the number of commands down considerably.

I guess it'd be possible to set up a VI-mode like this in EMACS. Has
anyone done something like this? This, plus scrolling windows, would
completely convert me to Emacs. Right now I put up with VI.
-- 
-- `-_-' Peter (have you hugged your wolf today) da Silva.
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