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Date:Mon Sep 9 12:48:34 1993 
Subject:Re: emacs & ved; flame-bait. 
From:David Hobley 
Volume-ID:930909.01 

In article ArH@cs.bham.ac.uk, kers@uk.co.hewlett-packard.hpl (Chris Dollin)  writes:
>Tim says:
>
>| Look on the bright side though, when you do leave ved and go back to emacs,
>| you are reminded how nice it is...
>
>Yes, when forced to re-use emacs, I am often reminded of how nice ved is ...

>What *do* people like? [Err, perhaps this should go to private email,
>otherwise we will have a large number of p-o'ed po-p users.]
>

I don't know - if we don't discuss problems with the environment it'll never
get improved.

I have a Sparc at work and a Mac at home, I run vanilla X11R5 on both. Personally
I far prefer X based editors over terminal based editors. As such this will be a
little unfair as I don't have XVED working at home yet.
I use Lucid Emacs at work and VED at home.

I use Lucid Emacs 19.8 only as I don't like 18.58 and GNU emacs 19.x is too ugly :-)

Emacs advantages:
	- The command and file completion is excellent. VED reading the whole line
	  before executing it is a pain.	
	- modes - I don't mean things like C mode here - I mean the shell/compile mode.
	  VED has lib vsh, but it is somewhat crippled. One of the things I am looking
	  at is an improved version of this which can deal with subprocesses somewhat
	  more portably. I have to wait until I have got dynamic linking sorted
          before I can start this :-)
	- tags support. Something I am looking at.
	- Lucid emacs has excellent mouse support - When it is waiting for a tag to be
	  input lets say, you can move the mouse over a valid tag and it will
	  highlight it. This can then be selected with the middle mouse button.
	  I don't know about XVED here.
	- Macro support is much better than dk.
	- Menu's - Lucid has an excellent Motif look and feel menubar for
	  those of use who don't have motif or openlook. I haven't got XVED
	  working yet, but poplog_ui warns that it isn't supported on
	  non motif/openlook systems.

VED advantages:
	- When moving the cursor down a column, it stays in that column.
	- Documentation - I find POPLOG documentation much easier to browse and
	  find specific answers quickly. Emacs I have to resort to asking someone
	  a lot of the time.
	- Support for tabs / notabs in files I find much better than emacs. Asking
	  for no tabs and pressing tabs inserts spaces upto the next tab stop. In
	  emacs <tab> doesn't do a tab, it tries to guess the indent.
	- Directory management - I prefer my editor to stay in the directory I
	  specify - having a separate directory per buffer is irritating.
	- The tight integration between the editor and the languages supported is
	  refreshing. I wish C and C++ were as tightly integrated (a non-trivial
	  task really ;-).

Personally I prefer VED to Emacs, however I am not especially unhappy about using
Emacs at work. For real flame bait - I like the design of the commands in vi best
of all. 
Biases - I started with VED at Sussex, moved to Emacs after I left and struggled
with vi when I had to.

anyone else ?

---
        David Hobley    davidh@cyclone.bt.co.uk
Through the darkness of futures past / The magician longs to see.
One chance out between two worlds    / Fire walk with me.