vi vs emacs in a student enviro

[Greg Woods]

In article <8235 at brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>In article <1045 at ficc.UUCP> peter at ficc.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>>There does not exist a decent editor on UNIX, or for that matter any other
>>system I have ever used.
>[followed by a very incomplete description of his ideas for an editor]
>
>"There does not exist" requires either proof or exhaustive investigation.
>Just because neither "vi" nor "EMACS" strikes you as decent does not
>mean that some other editor might not.

I whole-heartedly agree.  We had a thing called fred at UofCalgary: the
FRiendly EDitor, based on ed, with lots of features, including a
"vi-like" full-screen mode.  That's what I learned.  Moved to Gosling
emacs as soon as I could.  But then I was a lisp fan.

>In article <1559 at edison.GE.COM> rja at edison.GE.COM (rja) writes:
>>Here at work we have one version of emacs (ie; microEMACS) running on our
>
>And it would be great if each of the vendors mentioned supported that
>particular delicious flavor of an admittedly great, editor microEMACS.

WHY microEMACS?  (FLAME ON!)

I don't know how many of the features these people use, but I crashed my
PC and dumped core on Xenix with microEMACS (my own incarnation from 3.7
with zillions of bug fixes already done) so many times, I gave up and
used vi until Jove came along.  Both the latest version of microEMACS
(3.9i) and microGnuEmacs (latest posting) still contain many of the bugs
I fixed (I know, I checked).  If you've ever ported microEMACS, you'll
swear at it until you're blue.  It is the poorest piece of code I've
ever worked on [;-)], I did most of my bug fixes for the Conroy(?) version
that came with MWC, carried them up to 3.7, and it looks like lots still
need doing again.  BTW:  I won't give out my 3.7.x version, since Jove
is much better. :-)

On the other hand, Jove (ie 4.6.1.4 and up) is the BEST written editor
I've ever studied (I've seen Unipress Emacs both recently, and many
years ago when Gosling was still writing it (I didn't know any better
back then either), and I've had a brief Encounter With GNU emacs).  Jove
is very portable, and getting better all the time.  4.8 hasn't dumped
core since I fixed one bug, and the only annoying thing is the
occasional dropping of a line from the display.  Don't bother flaming me
about this flame.  I don't care if you think I KNOW good code when I
read it or not.

Jove also seems to have more features, that work nicer, than the
micro*EMAC's.  Jove does enough that I don't miss lisp.  Someone
mentioned macros:  vi macros are weird; Jove macros can do almost
anything; lisp can do anything.

Whoa! It's time to stop this nonsense!
-- 
						Greg Woods.

UUCP: utgpu!woods, utgpu!{cpcc, ontmoh, ontmoh!cpcc, tmsoft!cpcc}!woods
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