vi and emacs questions : summary of replies

[P. Ashton]

Some weeks ago I posted a question about vi and emacs. I asked about
whether it was practical to run GNUemacs in a student environment
on a VAX 11/750 running 4.3BSD, and SUN 3/50s and 3/60s given that
we'd heard GNUemacs was quite resource hungry, and whether there was
a version of vi for VMS. I got several replies (too many to put into one
posting) thanks to all those that responded.

GNUemacs resource requirements - most replies said that GNUemacs uses a
lot of CPU and memory, and that they don't use it on machines as small
as a VAX 11/750 for students. Many smaller emacs were suggested as
alternatives, including microemacs (comp.sources.unix archives), JOVE
(4.3 bsd user contributed software tape), and MicroGNU (now called mg - not
sure how to get hold of it). One person reported running up to 10 emacs
users on a VAX 11/780 running 4.3BSD, but didn't specify which version
of emacs he was running.

Vi on VMS - the only implementation reported was as part of the UNIX
environment for VMS from Interactive Systems and Wollongong (the
person didn't know how to contact the vendor however). This information
was sent to me by davidsen at steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) so
anyone interested in pursuing this may be able to get some more info from
him.

As for which editor to use next year - we have decided on some form of
emacs - probably microemacs. We believe (as did all of the people who
expressed an opinion in their mail messages) that emacs is the better
editor, and is more widely available over different operating systems
than vi. One person replied that Unix programmers have to know vi, and
that emacs should only be taught to people who already know vi. However
we are a CS dept which offers degrees in Computer Science, not an
institution for turning out Unix programmers, so this argument wasn't
really applicable.




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