vi vs emacs in a student enviro

[Mamaliz @ The Soup Kitchen]

You're going to have to do some customization, no matter what; it sounds
like you don't mind that but would rather avoid redesigning the entire
command key mapping.

There are vi emulators for every programmable Emacs, but they do emulate
vi, so the command set is just as bad (or good).  The most complete I've
seen is viplus from UniPress, but it's just plain old Emacs underneath;
you better not expect to use it the same way you use vi (edit, exit the
editor, compile, edit, etc.).  It's best to start it and stay in it.
If you don't want to work that way, you'll hate it, but if you take the
time to get used to it, you spend much less time thrashing.

In most Emaces I've seen, ESC-0 through ESC-9 already do build the prefix
argument.

What don't you like about the way Emacs updates the screen (which Emacs,
btw)?  Some are better than others.  Sometimes you have to tweak the
termcap entry for Emacs to work well.

liz
sommers at njin.rutgers.edu