vi vs emacs in a student enviro

[mcdonald at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu]

I just have to say something about the vi vs. good editors debate.
Vi is an ergonomic disaster area. Its basic problem is that it is modal,
very badly so. (I am NOT considering the possibility of any customization-
beacuse the context is that a person learning it can instantly use it
on ANY system with it, without having someone else customize it. If
they learn it well enough they can of course do customizing.)
You just can't learn a few commands and expect to be really useful,
because you will accidentally hit an unlearned key and get sucked off
into never-never land. One important goal of designing a user interface
for an editor should be that a single key or set of keys does one and
only one thing. It shouldn't matter what "mode" one is in. This is
seldom totally feasible, but at a minimum one should have a normal mode
wherein ALL the normal printing keys inset themselves in the text, where
all cursor keys work, where destructive forward and backward delete work,
etc. Preferably it should also do delete by words and lines, undelete
by whatever it deletes, page up and page down. Vi doesn't do this.
Emacs does, and so do virtually every other editor I have used - EDT for
the VAX, Wordstar, Wordperfect, and many others for the IBMPC. Now all
the ones I mentioned do have a "command mode", emacs less so than the
others, but is is seldom necessary to use it. If one sees a mistake
nearby in the text, you can just hit a couple of cursor keys, go there
and fix things, and come back, without changing modes. Vi doesn't
seem to do that. I feel it would be better to teach a better editor than
vi. Emacs is certainly complicated, and might not be the answer, but
there HAS to be something better than vi.