James wrote:
> ->On Fri, 19 Jun 1998, James wrote:
> ->
> ->>i like VI, it's quick, small and has no distracting menus (ok so you
> -> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> ->I use emacs from the console...
>
> i've never used emacs (except X-Emacs), it has strange key combinations
> to remember (i know VI has them too, but i learnt vi first and my head'd
> explode trying to remember 2 sets of commands) - go on, tell me that emacs's
> keys are the most intuitive and logical around :)
I'm an XEmacs diehard, but I wouldn't claim that the keys are
particularly `intuitive', but then I wouldn't consider vi's keys
intuitive either (although I learned vi first). Personally, I think
that the main downside of the vi model is the command mode vs insert
mode distinction.
However, I don't really consider this to be an issue. If I'm going to
use one program more than I use all other programs combined (which is
the case with XEmacs), I'm going to learn it by RTFM rather than
intuition. The amount of time taken to learn keybindings is trivial
compared to the time spent using the package.
vi and (X)Emacs are (almost) at opposite ends of the scale. vi is
basically just a text editor. Emacs includes a lisp interpreter and a
vast number of add-on packages, including both dumb and
curses-compatible terminal emulators, mail and news packages, web
browser, transparent FTP support, version control, file manager,
calendar, calculator, lisp debugger, lots of online help, some games,
... even a vi emulation mode.
The thing about Emacs is that once you've learned the keys, most of
them apply generally, so you don't need to learn different keystrokes
for different packages. Also, bear in mind that the Athena widgets
also use Emacs keybindings, as does bash (and anything else that uses
the GNU readline library) by default. Netscape even overrides the
default Motif bindings with Emacs-compatible ones.
--
Glynn Clements <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
