[Gllug] vi vs emacs (repeat)

[Nix]

On Mon, 7 Mar 2005, Benedikt Heinen suggested tentatively:
>>> The editor is strongly modal: you're typing text or doing other things,
>>> never both at once, and you need to explicitly switch (ESC goes one way,
>>> `i' and `a' and a myriad of other keystrokes go the other way).
>>
>> I dispute that vi is modal - any more than Emacs is modal because you
>> are in "minibuffer command mode" whenever you type M-x. vi has insert
>> commands and they take potentially lengthy arguments, that's
>> all.
> 
> There still is a difference. For commands that are bound to key
> sequences, you won't need M-x. Whereas in vi you can't circumvent
> using ESC mode switches...

Yes: key sequence reading is very similar in spirit to vi inserts
and so on.

(See also the vi-dot.el package for Emacs; I have an XEmacs port
which I plan to put in the XEmacs package tree shortly.)

-- 
> ...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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