From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Thomas Bushnell, BSG" Message-ID: <871yer98s4.fsf@becket.becket.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii References: Subject: Re: [9fans] samuel Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 10:10:18 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 63771eac-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com (Russ Cox) writes: > I'm impressed. We're in the middle of a religious war > over editors and neither emacs nor vi is involved. Emacs is not an editor, it's a comprehensive user interface environment. That's why it gets such strong emotions: people who think it should just be an editor, or who dislike the particular UI environment it gives you, hate it. People who compare it only against other editors and find it way better also miss the point, because to be fair, it should be compared against the whole suite of editor, debugger UI, news reader, mail client, etc. I prefer emacs over other user interfaces because 1) I need to move the mouse less 2) The same commands (nearly) work everywhere 3) My brain happens to be well wired for it. But I once was a perfectly content vi user, and I can use it pretty darn efficiently too. I'm sure the same is true for nearly any sane editor, and insane ones really just aren't in the running. So I find editor wars singularly boring. Actually, the most important reason I don't use vi is that I use the Dvorak keyboard, and the use of positional keys in vi (hjkl) is a pain when you are using a different key layout.