john@moncol.UUCP (John Ruschmeyer) (03/06/86)
We are in the process of migrating the majority of our CS program to the UNIX environment. Up until now, most students have been using vi as their editor. A few of our CS professors, however, are concerned about how well students can pick up this editor. My question is this: What editor do you use/recommend for use by students? Are there editors for UNIX which are "friendlier", particularly to novices? Replies by mail would be appreciated. I will summarize to the net if there is interest. Thanks in advance. -- Name: John Ruschmeyer US Mail: Monmouth College, W. Long Branch, NJ 07764 Phone: (201) 571-3451 UUCP: ...!vax135!petsd!moncol!john ...!princeton!moncol!john ...!pesnta!moncol!john Give an ape control of its environment and it will fill the world with bananas.
marco@andromeda.UUCP (the wharf rat) (03/09/86)
In article <184@moncol.UUCP>, john@moncol.UUCP (John Ruschmeyer) writes: > > What editor do you use/recommend for use by students? Are there editors for > UNIX which are "friendlier", particularly to novices? > Replies by mail would be appreciated. I will summarize to the net if there > is interest. > I tried to e-mail; for some reason the mailer kept returning the message. > I think vi is a very friendly editor, but we use emacs a lot here. emacs has the advantage of being the same on many systems, as well as neat windowing and macros. W.rat
chapman@miro.berkeley.edu (Brent Chapman) (03/09/86)
In article <121@andromeda.UUCP> marco@andromeda.UUCP (the wharf rat) writes: >In article <184@moncol.UUCP>, john@moncol.UUCP (John Ruschmeyer) writes: >> >> What editor do you use/recommend for use by students? Are there editors for >> UNIX which are "friendlier", particularly to novices? >> > I think vi is a very friendly editor, but we use emacs a lot >here. emacs has the advantage of being the same on many systems, >as well as neat windowing and macros. > > W.rat EMACS also has the disadvantage of being very cpu and memory intensive as well. If your hardware situation is typical (too many students and too few resources), you may not want a really neat program that will bog down the system, when a less full-featured, but still very good editor (like vi) won't cause such a load. Most students in an intro class would not use most of the features of EMACS, anyway. I don't use EMACS myself, so I can't comment on its ease of use or its features first-hand. I have seen demonstrations (by a friend of mine who is a manager for several of our undergraduate machines here at Berkeley) of what EMACS can do to a system. It's impressive, if you have the capacity to spare. Brent Chapman chapman@miro.berkeley.edu ucbvax!miro!chapman