vi vs emacs in a student enviro

[Herman Rubin]

In article <2819 at tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM>, terryl at tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM writes:
> 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.

			...........

>      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!!!

I wish I could have some such feature on the editors available.   I find it
extremely annoying to have line numbers changed in the editing process.  With
both vi and emacs, it is still true that all lines are numbered, but the 
numbers are constantly changing.  Every insertion or deletion of a line now
renumbers the entire file; is this any better than sometimes having to do
so yourself?
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin at l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)