Re: [X]Emacs vs. vi[m] (was Re: Why is XEmacs better than Emacs?)
verna@inf.enst.fr said:
> On the contrary, Emacs is more suitable for developement purposes, and
> actually for many other things.
Well, vim (and gvim) is actually quite powerful for development
purposes. All the best (IMO) that emacs had was taken into vim already.
> Personally, I practically *live* in my XEmacs session.
You can't do this in vim, but I've never figured out why you'd want to.
Back in the days when I logged in over an HDS terminal, I could see the
advantage of all this. But in a modern X environment I would rather
not. Netscape is a fine browser, exmh is an excellent mail reader,
tkman is the best man page browser I've seen, bash supports scrollable
history, etc. Why would I want to do everything in Emacs when there's
so many other packages that do what they do best? I want an editor to
be used for editing. But hey, different strokes for different folx.
What really sets vim apart is that it is a *modal* editor. That means
the same keys do different things depending on the mode (normal mode,
insert mode, visual mode, etc). The advantage is that you can do 99% of
your editing without taking your fingers off the home row. You don't
need to use the cursor keys, page up/down, home, end and all the others.
You *can* use those keys, but you can also just keep your fingers where
they belong.
That's a big step for some people, and I can understand why many people
wouldn't want it. Viva la variety.
Personally, I use gvim (or vim for real quick things), but I've
installed nedit and encourage my users to use that. It's very simple,
supports syntax-highlighting, fully GUI from the ground up, and
customizable. Most of my users are economists and research assistants
writing SAS and FAME (a time-series database) programs. They certainly
have no need for a modal editor, and the learning curve for emacs can be
a little steeper than they need. It's there, of course, and a couple
use it 'cause they already knew it.
rgds-- TA (tallard@frb.gov)
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