On 14 June 2017 at 23:50, Alan Feuerbacher <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 6/14/2017 12:05 PM, Richard Melville wrote:
>
>>
>> I was always a vim user, but I've been using emacs for about a year and I
>> really like it. ...
>>
>> As I say, in the past I've always been a vim user.  I avoided emacs
>> because it always seemed as though it was trying to be all things to all
>> people.  It never seemed quite unix enough: one tool to do one job.
>> However, I started using it last year in earnest and I'm impressed with the
>> power of it (particularly the number of additional modules).  I'm probably
>> unusual in that I always have both vim and emacs installed and use them
>> both.  I know that there are a few lightweight editors out there, but
>> because I'm used to vim I tend to use it for quick edits to files and
>> reserve emacs for large projects.
>>
>
> I almost always use vim, partly because I'm used to it and partly because
> I can edit stuff quite a bit faster than with emacs. Emacs needs more
> keystrokes to do the same job, often enough that I've found it annoying.
> Also, on my job I sometimes found that the "ed" or "ex" component of "vi"
> was needed, and keeping up with vi kept me up with the "ex" commands. These
> are largely the same as from the ancient "ed" editor from lineprinter days.
>
> When I was a student at MIT from 1979 onward, I worked part time at the AI
> Lab (Artificial Intelligence), where Richard Stallman had worked for
> several years after dropping his CS program. He had become a fixture there,
> and wrote the first version of Emacs in an old editor (Teco?) that had
> impossible syntax. Emacs became the de facto editor for the AI Lab and ran
> on old DEC machines. Eventually a grad student named Bernie Greenberg
> ported Emacs to Lisp, and eventually others ported versions to Unix. Emacs
> has so many features and abilities that some people do all their computer
> work from it -- programming, whatever. Stallman, of course, went on to
> found the GNU organization and the Free Software Foundation.


That's an interesting piece of history.  I assumed that emacs was written
in lisp from the beginning.

Richard
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