Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa.epi.umn.edu> wrote:
> I do not recommend vi, gvim, etc. to students.  I recommend emacs
> instead.  The reason is that vi was not developed for modern computers
> and it has an unusual, unintuitive way of doing things.  Emacs is
> easier to learn.

Funny story.  Back in '94, I decided not to be a Chemical Engineer and
dropped out of the program in Grand Forks in favor of a Biochemistry
program in Duluth.  I still wanted to use email, so I visited the
computer lab and started talking to one of the techs.  You see, one of
my friends told me about this file in your home directory called a
".plan" file that could be displayed when you typed "finger USERNAME".
I wanted to edit that file.  Although I knew pine and pico, the computer
lab tech steered me toward the vi editor.  I'm paraphrasing here, but I
believe he said something like this:

	"If you want to learn to edit in UNIX, learn vi."

So, I did.  I went to the book store and bought a UNIX reference book,
and a Vi reference book.  Little pamphlets that cost me about $5 each.
Well worth it, given that I hated notepad on Windows 3.1.  (Yep, I was a
student at the time, just to point out the obvious.)

The time was well spent.  Although I didn't use vi a whole lot, having
that reference helped me out quite a bit then and when I went to my
first job post-college.  As what, you might ask?  A programmer working
on a DEC OSF/1.  At that time, I was a rabid Emacs fan and wanted to
install it on everything.  Was I disappointed to learn that not only
would I not get my Emacs on that machine, but that I had to learn vi
again!

That was when my co-worker pointed out ViM for Windows...  Now, I could
say that was the end of the story, but here I am writing my email in
Emacs with MH-E mode, trying to re-learn all the crazy keystrokes.

> I also think it is easier to remember the keystrokes, and emacs keys
> are used in the readline library and thus in many programs (like the
> bash commandline).

If you come from a pico/nano/joe/wordstar editor background, then Emacs
will be like a familiar walk in the park.  The context-switching modes
of vi throw off a lot of people, but it can really cut down on CTRL-META
finger gymnastics.

> It is often possible to swich to vi command-line editing, but then you
> have to switch and deal with the fact that other people have not
> switched.

    shell$ echo set editing-mode vi >> ~/.inputrc

> That said, I have nothing against vi and would not encourage a vi user
> to switch to something else.

Productivity is in the numbers.  Use what makes you fast and accurate.

Chad