[Gllug] vi vs emacs (repeat)

[Nix]

On Mon, 07 Mar 2005, Tethys uttered the following:
>                                        I find vi to be the most efficient
> way I've found of editing text. I don't need (or indeed want) my editor to
> be able to read mail/news, browse the web, psychoanalyse me, or use many
> of megabytes of RAM :-) I have other perfectly good programs for that. I
> just want my editor to be able to edit text, and vi does that extremely
> well.

I don't really think of Emacs as a text editor anymore: it's the
environment in which I do, well, virtually everything. Part of that work
is editing text, part of it is other stuff; Emacs does it all: and even
on the text editing front, I'm afraid that for programmatic stuff the
semantic bovinator and semantically-driven indentation and colourization
knocks the socks of vi (however, the thing I use to do this isn't stable
enough for general use yet). And for (La)TeX, of course, preview-latex
and auctex mode blows vi into little shredded pieces ;) vi users
probably mostly prefer nroff, anyways.

(Wild overgeneralization combined with reasoning from packages I'm
halfway through developing? Moi? Never! This is an entirely fair and
unbiased comparison which merely happens to be biased and unfair.)

> The only real way to work out which to use is try both and see which you
> prefer.

Seconded. (Or use both. Most Emacs users do. vi is a good text editor for
*little* edits. :) )

-- 
> ...Hires Root Beer...
What we need these days is a stable, fast, anti-aliased root beer
with dynamic shading. Not that you can let just anybody have root.
 --- John M. Ford
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