simsong@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Simson L. Garfinkel) (12/22/90)
Well, I got a total of 50 responses to the "name of the editor of your choice" question. The voting is now closed; please don't send me any more votes. Total tally: EMACS: 32 Edit: 17 vi: 5 The numbers don't add up because some people use both editors. In general, most of the Edit people seemed to be people who didn't want to deal with the complexity of emacs, or who moved to the NeXT from the Macintosh. Most of the Emacs people seem to be people who have of different kinds of computers. The main complaints (NeXT, you listening?) were: * Edit doesn't know about C. * Emacs isn't very well supported. My biggest complaint, by the way, is: * Emacs indent.el doesn't grook Objective-C syntax. I've summarized some of the more interesting comments below: I use Edit almost exclusively on NeXT. I will not use Emacs as long as it is a Terminal based application on any platform. I refuse to use Emacs and rather wait for a super editor to appear for NeXT. The only time I use another editor (sigh, 'vi') is when I have to see control characters in the file. I am a heavy emacs user and am about to get a NeXTstation for code development at home. If NeXT doesn't fully support emacs and doesn't do it right, I would like them to hear a loud collective scream. We use EMACS exclusively on all our NeXTs! The truth? VI. I type and it is more confortable for me to use it. Between EMACS and Edit I go for Edit. Just a note to say that I use GNU Emacs with Jogn G. Myer's Emacs front end, which I modified so that it can use the arrow keys. Edit is OK, but I simply cannot live without M-; and indent-region in C Mode, not to mention spell-word in Text Mode (I use TeX for all my technical writing). I use Edit, not Emacs. (I love Lisp/Scheme, and I recognize the power of Emacs, but it's interface is just too high a price for me to pay. The NeXT folks are doing their best to design power into Edit, and I hope it comes to approach Emacs power soon. However, none of this means that NeXT should be off the hook if they screwed up the Esc key as you mentioned...). I use Edit. I like it and I *hate* Emacs. BTW when using other UNIX boxes I use vi. I use both, usually Edit only for short looks and small jobs. I really like John Myers' front end. I use emacs, but could be convinced to use Edit if there were a way to give it some knowledge of the textual structure of computer languages. Edit's C mode is lacking right now for me. I would also hate to give up the ability to compose macro's on the fly as in emacs. You never know what iterative editing task that will be presented to you. Also, the buffer positioning to compilation error line would be sorely missed. I use Edit. Five years of Macintosh mousing is a hard habit to break. I've also used teco, vi, h19, edt, emacs, and ked. Each of these has it's own set of control keys, and even remembering the basic things like find and replace for each is difficult. Mouse based editors, on the other hand, all work pretty much the same. I use both emacs & edit. For writing code, though, I almost always use emacs. Having a c-mode in edit would be a godsend... In fact, I think we use vi more then we use Edit. Scary thought. Edit? Feh. The only time Edit ever launches on my machine is when I accidentally click on something in a browser window. I use emacs and I'm a commercial user. I want a pointer emacs and a meta key. I use emacs. Most programmers here use emacs but the secretaries use Edit. (4 emacs, 5 Edit)
rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony) (12/22/90)
I still hope that once emacs 19.0 is available under X, that NeXT takes the effort to develop us a nice NeXTStep interface to it. Edit is nice, but it has a LONG way to go to come even close to emacs functionality. Nevertheless Edit is more powerful than most people think. The User commands are a nice example on how to improve Edit. e.g. you can call indent and its input is the selected text, its output goes back into the buffer etc... Ronald ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." G.B. Shaw | rca@cs.brown.edu or antony@browncog.bitnet