On Sun, 21 Jun 1998, Moshe Zadka wrote:
> Well, with vi's command mode saves one from the pianist syndrom.
> (E.g. alt-shift-5). Of course, that way, your fingers will not
> elongate. If you want to play the piano, EMACS is a great
> excercise. (Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift isn't just an
> acronym).
This is not a reasonable excuse. You can easily rebind keys in Emacs to
any combination. Besides that, the most commonly used keys aren't that
long.
> Er....emacs *is* a lisp interpreter. It's just that someone chose
> to write an editor in it. I prefer editors written in 'C'.
Emacs, imo, is a better editor than those written in 'C.'
Try setting the tabwidth to 4 with autoindent on in Vi, and everything
screws up (ctrl-D no longer works as it should). One particular set of
features of emacs I like is the auto-formatting package, multiple
windows, compiling and debugging support (i.e. you can compile and trace
your code within Emacs).
> Yes, we all know EMACS is a pretty good OS. The question is,
> ``How easy is it to write text with it?''.
I thought Vi was harder when I started learning it. I had no idea of
command/editing mode, and when I pressed keys it just beeped and did
nothing. And when I did started writing text, sometimes it would be in
command mode because I forgot to press "i", and ended up with a bunch of
garbage. You have to constantly remember what state you're in, in VI, as
if all those variables isn't enough. Not to mention the explicit commands
makes it cumbersome.. e.g. to delete existing text, you'd have to ESC to
command mode and explicitly use the delete command.
In fairness, one thing I DO like about vi that's lacking in Emacs is the
quick method of doing regular expressions and substitutions. You'd have to
put Emacs in VI mode for that which is too cumbersome to switch back and
forth just for s/sometext/blah. Emacs do have regexp support, but in
this case the interface is just better (quicker) in Vi.
Herry
