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

[Mario O. Bourgoin]

In article <1586 at ncoast.UUCP> allbery at ncoast.UUCP writes:
>| 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...

In GnuEmacs, it is a matter of saying ^u<number><action>. In JOVE, you
can say Escape<number><action>.

>+---------------
>| 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.

If I'm allowed to use numeric arguments to tell the macro how many
words there are, easily and clearly. Otherwise, it is simpler to use a
function.

I do agree that it serves little purpose to argue editors. Emacses
could include better functions to handle words and lines. I say,
whatever works for you. I just wanted to show that Emacs does work for
me.

--Mario O. Bourgoin