Decent Unix Editors!! (one man's opinion, anyway)

[Kent Paul Dolan]

Editor war! Editor war!

Don't feel for a moment like like comp.unix.amiga doesn't have equal
rights on taking something like this to comp.sys.amiga.advocacy!!!!!

brsmith at cs.umn.edu (Brian R. Smith) writes:

> No, popularity alone doesn't say much. But, vi comes with every unix
> system, and MANY folks go through the trouble of replacing it with
> emacs. GNU emacs is more powerful, more flexible, and has "Zippy the
> Pinhead" quotes...

Yep, and _lots_ of other garbage that needs yanking out for a decent run
time size. Nice editor, if it would only stop there.

> The standard emacs keys (the 8-10 keys for cursor movement,
> delete-char, kill-line, etc.) are also found in the Athena string
> widget, the Motif string widget, the Open Look string widget,
> FrameMaker, tcsh, etc. I don't know if emacs is the cause of this
> consistency, but it is convenient.

Of course, that doesn't hold a candle to the fact that learning the vi
keys by heart makes you a killer nethack player.  ;-)

> If you HAVE to learn either vi or emacs, I'd say go for emacs. I
> haven't seen anything friendlier on a unix machine.

Nope, learn them both. Emacs has feature power, view windowing, good
reformating, superior shell execute and capture capabilities; vi has
_much_ superior navigation capabilities and filter interfaces. Emacs is
much better for code, vi is much better (teamed with some decent text
filters) for text. For coming up quick to get a short job done, vi wins
hands down; for an editor you can stay in all day, GNUemacs can't be
beat.

Neither one of them has a file/buffer access mechanism or multi-file
_really_ fast simultaneous edit capability worth warm spit, though each
lets you carry the same edit from file to file with some savings in
keystrokes but still lots of tedium.

Compared, that is, to a decent interactive editor that performs a text
substitution or string search on all the files in all the directories
pulled out by a pathname regular expression, or selected by a mouse
sweep on a multiscreen file requestor, faster than you can see the
affected file names fly by.

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian at Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian at well.sf.ca.us>
--
Wishing wistfully that Stuart Mc<whatever> would port his editor "Hack"
from '386 MS-DOS to Unix so we'd actually have a halfway acceptable
large project source code editor in Unix boxes.