On Wed, 25 Aug 2010, Chuck Cole wrote: >> -----Original Message----- >> From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org >> [mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org]On Behalf Of Mike Miller >> Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2010 10:01 PM >> >> Emacs is better. Actually, and this is true, emacs was written at MIT >> where they had more computing power and better networking. vi was >> written for slow networks and that was the reason for the awkward way >> that it works. I read that in an article by Bill Joy, author of vi. > > IIRC, vi was used when "networks" were typically accessed in-house or > remotely by 10 character-per-second mechanical teletypes. Emacs was > developed much later, and after megabit/sec in-house nets and CRT dumb > terminals were common. 300 baud, actually. You can read the relevant part of the 1999 interview here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/ Here's an interview with Joy from 1984: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html The bit about vi being free and "EMACS" costing hundreds of dollars is interesting. I remember that you could order EMACS on tapes. You get the impression that Joy liked emacs better than he liked vi and he thought vi was passé even in 1999: "People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore." I know that you can make vim do good things, and the syntax highlighting looks nice, and I get that vi is on all UNIX/Linux systems and therefore useful in a clinch, but I don't see why people argue that vi/vim/gvim is better than emacs. I think those people are just really good with vim and not so good with emacs, so vim seems better to them. Mike