editor wars ad infinitum... [FLAME]

[Root Boy Jim]

	From: Mike (I'll be mellow when I'm dead)Meyer
		<mwm%opal.Berkeley.EDU at BERKELEY.EDU>
	
	I apologize in advance. I missed the original, otherwise I would have
	sent mail to the original author. But I can't let this pass as is....
	
	> I don't understand why vi has such a bad rep. The keys are mnemonic,
	> which is more than I can say for emacs.
	
	Huh? Please explain hjkl for up/down/left/right. Mnemonic, my ass!

Must I quote the derivation of this *yet another time*? Ever see an ADM-3a?
Got little arrows on the hjkl keys like so: <v^>. That's what the corresponding
control chars do. Same with the tvi950 and I'm sure lots of others. Ever
play rogue, or hack, or almost every video game to appear from TPC or BSD?

	At least emacs has Contrl-[{F}orward,{B}ackward,{P}revious,{N}ext].

Mnemonic yes, but they're spread out all over the keyboard. At least
hjkl are together.
	
	The rest of the command set is about the same. Meta-<char> does a
	bigger version of Contrl-<char>.

Except for M-v. BTW, C-V is pretty hard on those fingers.

	Contrl-e{X}tended commands do things
	like {F}indfile, {S}avefile, etc. No worse than ":e" or ":w".

Agreed.
	
	I've taught secretaries to use Emacs before. No problem. You teach
	them a basic command set, and they get by just fine. Some even start
	investigating the OTHER things that Emacs can do. And of course, the
	online help in Emacs is much better than that in vi.

True enuf.
	
	[End of Flame.]
	
	The mnemonicity of the command set is actually irrelevant, unless it's
	an editor you use only once in a great while. In which case, you
	probably want a mouse anyway.
	
Did you get to read the part I posted about mice? Was it quoted?

	If you use an editor regularly, your
	fingers learn the right sequences to type to make things happen.

Again I agree.
	
	This is why function keys, or any other key which doesn't have a place
	on a Selectric keyboard, are bad things to use. They move as you go
	from one keyboard to another. But it's VERY hard to build an editor
	that doesn't use at least some of those characters.

Not really, as both vi and emacs have demonstrated. And I don't care
what's on a selectric, as *I* am not a secretary and do not touch type,
I also hate *relying* on function keys, but don't mind extra mappings to them.
	
	And the above two things are good reasons for doing what I suggested
	before - choose the software you want to use, then buy hardware that
	it runs well on.
	
	As for mouse vs. keyboard, why not get both?

Mice are expensive.
	
	That way, you've got nice
	features, if not the best, of both worlds [I'd still like to do
	drag-select in Emacs :-].  If you've got a well-designed editor,
	adding mouse support should be straightforward.  For instance, GNU
	Emacs has a mouse interface for Suntools and X, and microGNU on the
	Amiga has a mouse interface. Hasn't someone done that for vi and it's
	micro-based clones?

Probably not. Why bother when emacs is available? Listen, I'm not trying
to say that vi is better than emacs. It obviously isn't. I am trying to
say that vi is good enuf to make some people (me) avoid using emacs
because of the hassles of becoming proficient with it. Or in other
words, if emacs didn't exist, why not vi?

I would like to hear an answer to my challenge: Does anyone use SUN's textedit?
	
		<mike

	(Root Boy) Jim Cottrell		<rbj at icst-cmr.arpa>