oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (06/03/87)
There is a common case where emacs uses much fewer cycles than vi. When you page through a file by hitting the page key on your keyboard quickly, vi insists on processing your input one key at a time, laborously drawing page after page that any intelligent program could tell you aren't interested in. Emacs is an intelligent program: if your type ahead would cause the current re-display to be invalid, it doesn't bother finishing the re-display, it uses its CPU time slot to DO what you want instead of to SHOW what you don't want, and when it is done DOING, it shows just the final state, not all the intermediate state. Richard calls this "Load Shedding" as the cpu gets more and more loaded, Emacs uses less and less cpu time (because it does less drawing). By comparison vi wastes huge amounts of CPU time, and my time drawing stuff I'm no longer interested in. If you read Richard Stallman's paper on the philosphy of Emacs (published in the proceedings of the ACM conference on Text Processing in Portland Oregon in the early '80s, you'd already know this stuff.) --- David Phillip Oster -- "The goal of Computer Science is to Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu -- build something that will last at Uucp: ucbvax!dewey.soe!oster -- least until we've finished building it."
rshuford@well.UUCP (06/03/87)
The reference mentioned about EMACS is "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-Documenting Display Editor" by Richard M. Stallman. Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA Symposium on Text Manipulation, Portland, OR, 8-10 June 1981. Appeared as SIGPLAN Notices, volume 16, number 6, June 1981. ACM order number 548810. .....Richard S. Shuford Scientific Programmer Siecor Corporation RD&E, Hickory, NC 28603-0489 BIX: richard
hartzell@boulder.Colorado.EDU (George Hartzell) (06/03/87)
In article <19219@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster) writes: >There is a common case where emacs uses much fewer cycles than vi. >When you page through a file by hitting the page key on your keyboard >quickly, vi insists on processing your input one key at a time, >laborously drawing page after page that any intelligent program could >tell you aren't interested in. Emacs is an intelligent program: if >your type ahead would cause the current re-display to be invalid, it >doesn't bother finishing the re-display, it uses its CPU time slot to >DO what you want instead of to SHOW what you don't want, and when it I am using gnu emacs v18.41. When I hit a bunch of C-v's emacs draws each page. Did I misconfigure something when I installed emacs or... g. George Hartzell (303) 492-4535 MCD Biology, University of Colorado-Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309 hartzell@Boulder.Colorado.EDU ..!{hao,nbires}!boulder!hartzell