[Beowulf] [OT] EMACS vs VI

[Bob Drzyzgula]

e2 & e3 -- were those the ones that, when you searched for a string it
would draw ovals around the results? I was fond of those as well, for
the limited time I had anything to do with OS/2. For a while, on our
Sun systems in the late '80s but before emacs gained any popularity,
we offered the RAND editor e19. It was largely function-key driven and
didn't know how to use termcap, so it was a PITA to port to a new
terminal, but on a VT2xx clone it was pretty nice for the time -- it
was pretty easy for a non-technical user.

On a lot of platforms in the early days there weren't a lot of
choices, you just used what was there. In the early '80s, I worked at
some places were Wylbur was just How One Did Things; but it was
actually pretty powerful. If you were working on VM/CMS you were
probably editing in xedit and scripting in Rexx. And if you were
working interactively on OS/MVS, the best you could hope for was
probably SPF/PDF.

--Bob

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Joe Landman
<landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
> shades of editor wars from ...  decades ago ...
>
> e2 and e3 (a programming editor at IBM TJ Watson, never made it out the
> door as far as I remember, though OS2 had some build variant of it built
> in), was amazing.  Pretty good by todays standards.
>
> If I'm remote, no higher bandwidth link, I'll use vim, pico/nano, or vi.
>  If there is a higher bandwidth connection, I've used nedit (wrote a
> thesis in an earlier version), and am largely switching to kate .  I
> just could never grok emacs.  I could get TeX and LaTeX, and many other
> arcane things.  I just couldn't get my mind around emacs.  Or vi for
> that matter.  I am ok with it, but after 20+ years using it, I am
> *still* dangerous with it.  I am thankful for the undo feature in vim.
>
> kate is the closest thing to a good editor I've used since e2.  e2 just
> rocked.  This was 1985-ish or so, and it still was good by todays
> standards.  Never made it out the door though.
>
> --
> Joseph Landman, Ph.D
> Founder and CEO
> Scalable Informatics Inc.
> email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
> web  : http://scalableinformatics.com
>        http://scalableinformatics.com/sicluster
> phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
> fax  : +1 866 888 3112
> cell : +1 734 612 4615
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>