[TriLUG] vi vs emacs

[Jeremy Portzer]

Wing D Lizard wrote:

> 
> To me, vi is a text editor -- but emacs is a development tool.  There 
> are extensions
> to both that allow you to do some pretty complex things, lots of 
> customization.
> But emacs wins out.
> 

This is kind of what I've heard from emacs users, although I've never 
taken the time to learn emacs myself.  I have used xemacs (which i 
realize is a separate branch) a few times many years ago before gvim was 
around, and liked the syntax highlighting and multiple windows that were 
available then.

I will point out that I've even seen Tanner, one of the more die-hard 
emacs supporters in TriLUG, use vi.  He must have to admit it's a 
necessary evil sometimes, since vi is almost guaranteed to be there, and 
emacs isn't.  That fact pretty much ensures that any *nix sysadmin must 
learn at least the basics of vi.

Right now I'm attempting to teach myself Eclipse but I haven't gotten 
very far.

In reality both vi and emacs are too obscure for beginning users, and 
for Linux to become more mainstream, we need to make sure "WYSIWYG" 
editors like nano are easily available.

--Jeremy