Editor resource consumption

[David Chase]

Before you all jump in and say "gosh emacs is a pig, we certainly could
not support the users that we do now if they all ran emacs instead of
vi/ed/teco/sos/edt/jove/ked", stop to think what things people do in the
different editors.

Emacs does a hell of a lot; some people here dive into emacs and don't
leave until they log out or until the memory allocator craps on them for
lack of any more address soace.  It takes longer to fire up.  On the other
hand, it allows you to edit more than one file at once, program up
complicated transformations, read mail, read bulletin boards, run
compilations in a subshell, etc, etc.  Of course it uses more resources.
With any luck it will free up some valuable human resources, but I make no
claims here.

I cannot speak for vi, because I know nothing about it.  I suspect that it
doesn't do as much.  Ed certainly does not.

So, comparing the resources used by the different editors is something
like comparing the resources used by motor homes and volkswagen bugs.
Please don't lose sight of this before embarking on another net-clogging
editor dicussion.

David