vi vs emacs in a student environment

[William E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <399 at cantuar.UUCP> paul at cantuar.UUCP (P. Ashton) writes:
| We are in the middle of deciding which editor to teach students next
| year, and are looking at vi and emacs. We have a couple of questions
| 
| (i) we have heard emacs is somewhat resource hungry. What experiences do
| people have with students using emacs with regard to resource use
| (environment GNU emacs on a Vax 11/750 running 4.3BSD, and on sun 3/50s
| and 3/60s).

  emacs is not monolithic, there are a number of flavors and styles. 
Certainly GNU emacs takes a great deal of memory, if not CPU.  There are
other flavors available, most commonly microemacs.  While it doesn't
contain a LISP compiler, most people don't really need that in their
editor, nor mail reading, process control, interactive jokes, or any of
the other stuff in GNU. GNU has many bells and whistles, and the LISP
compiler is adequate for teaching a one semister LISP course, if desired.

  Microemacs will run on Ultrix, BSD, SunOS, Xenix, Cray2, MS-DOS,
unix-pc, etc. It provides a full set of editing functions, windows, key
redefinition, and a complete macro programming language for special key
definitions. Size is about 78k on VAX, 120k on PC (with all features
enabled).

  There is a MicroGNU emacs (now called mg) which seems to have some of
the features of GNU. I haven't really tried it, but it is on several of
the Suns at this site, due to problems running full GNU on machines with
only 8 MB of memory.

| (ii) is vi available for VMS (if so what are the details)?

  As part of UNIX environment for VMS, from INteractive Systems and
Wolongong. I have no addresses for those vendors, but we have their
software on some of our VAXen at remote sites.

| Please reply by email - I will post a summary.
| 
| Paul Ashton.
| 
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-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me