RE: [UUG/MLUG] simple text editor

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 4 Nov 1999, Spurling, Shannon  wrote:
>
> Ahh! The age old question. People who use emacs are fanatical about
> it. 

Oh, like vi users are any better. :-)  

Seriously, I've always been amused by the limits to rational discussion
that spring up whenever the subject of text editors comes up.  People who
are by and large among the most rational on the planet will completely
lock up when confronted by some heathen who uses something they don't use.

Emacs *was* probably a better draw for fanatics, since it was
an editor than included a programming language, so you could have
religious beliefs about either one and still be religious, and if you
were religious about both...look out!  But these days, there seem to
be lots of extensible editors out there, of which vim and nedit appear
to be notable examples.

> Me, I don't like having to memorize all of the commands upfront. 

I got started in emacs knowing only these 8 commands:

^a   = beginning of line
^e   = End of line
^f   = Forward one character
^b   = Backward one character
^p   = Previous line
^n   = Next line
^x^s = Save
^x^c = quit

And with xemacs you should be able to do without knowing *any* of
these, since you can use the mouse and menus to do whatever you want.
I just checked, and it's clear to me that I "know" about 100 other
emacs commands in some sense, but I rarely if ever use more than about
20 of them.  Knowing a bit about vi, I think the command set size is
roughly comparable.

> I found emacs difficult to start with so I dropped it. vi is
> difficult, but easier to get started in.

vi is modal (you enter commands or text, and switch between the modes),
which actually does have some advantages at times.  But some people never
get comfortable with that.  Then there was the fact that it was built on
top of ed...whose commands are all quite, uh, terse.  But modern versions
of vi, notably vim, have drastically increased the comfort level you could
have with vi.  Vim in particular also allows you to do amazing things like
use perl as an extension language.  My inner geek is very intrigued by
this notion.  Unfortunately, my fingers are completely used to having
emacs-style navigation commands at all times.

I didn't know much about nedit, but having poked around a bit during
lunch, I can see why people could be enthusiastic about it.  Boom, it's
just there.  It's not obviously missing anything, and looks like could
have been released by Microsoft. :-)

[snip]

> I think you over estimate how easy emacs is to learn, though. 

See the above.

> Almost every one who uses emacs says it's easy. Every one who uses vi
> says emacs is hard to learn. Is the age old conflict between emacs and
> vi users.

Actually, the usual complaint about emacs is that it is horribly bloated.
(Also that lisp sucks, even though 99.9% of all emacs users never touch
the lisp innards.)  But, sure enough, my xemacs executable pigs out to 3.7
megs.  My vi is a relatively svelte, uh, 456K.  Oh wait: that's vim...but
vim without a perl interpreter; I can make it bigger than that. :-)  A
staticly linked nedit 4.0.3 is 1.5 megs.
 
jking