Vi vs. Emacs -- the religious wars start again...

[Brandon Allbery]

Quoted from <847 at cuuxb.UUCP> ["Re: VI(1) vs. the world"], by mwm at cuuxb.UUCP (Marc W. Mengel)...
+---------------
| In article <113 at twg-ap.UUCP> narayan at twg-ap.UUCP (Narayan Mohanram) writes:
| >>     -	multiple buffers and windows
+---------------

These were actually in vi at one point.  Problem was, the author was on a
PDP-11 and he couldn't fit any other features in with windows.

+---------------
| >>     -	query replace
+---------------

:g/foo/s//bar/gc leaves a lot to be desired.  It's difficult to type, and you
can only replace or not replace.  (JOVE:  yes, no, stop, recursive edit, pro-
ceed.  Recursive edit drops you back into the editor; C-X C-C puts you back
into search mode.  VERY useful if you replace something you didn't mean to!)

+---------------
| >>     -	keyboard macros
+---------------

:map :map! :ab

However, ^V^V^V^[ is a bit disgusting.  On the other hand, while the Emacs
technique of "defining-by-doing" is easy to pick up, I am often forced to
start an emacs on a junk file, define a macro, save it, then use it later.

+---------------
| >>     -	online help (":!man vi" doesn't count)
+---------------

I understand GNU Emacs has this.  I've seen some others; few have on-line help
that can really be called "help" (either hard to get it on the screen or as
hard to understand as the UNIX Programmer's Manual).

+---------------
| And one volley for the other side: I really like to be able to say "15j" to
| go down 15 lines, and "40a -<ESC>" to be able to make an 80 column dashed line.
| Does Emacs, (or any other editor, for that matter) provide this repeat n times
| facility? (this is not a rhetorical question, I don't know...)
+---------------

That trick is impossible in modeless editors without a "temporary macro"
feature that can be repeated; TECO comes to mind...

+---------------
| P.S. A Challenge to those Other Editor users, I can write a vi macro to 
| 	reverse the words on a line... can you?
+---------------

A macro to do that would be ugly.  Or worse, impossible to understand because
of "little tricks".  In Emacs, you write a function to do that kind of thing.
On the other hand, Lisp never impressed me that much...

It should be obvious by now that I don't consider either editor to be THE
PERFECT EDITOR.  And there are times when modal editors are more useful and
times when modeless editors are more useful.

++Brandon
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