From: pollard@cucbs.chem.columbia.edu (Tom Pollard)
Subject: Re: good vi editor for the mac
Organization: Center for Biomolecular Simulation
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 21:05:01 GMT

bell@teal.csn.org (Bell Scott) writes:

>pollard@cucbs.chem.columbia.edu (Tom Pollard) writes:
>> somebody (?)  writes:
>> >I want a good vi . . . for the mac.
>> 
>> .................................  There are a lot of things that are much
>> easier to do in a good mainframe editor, like vi and especially emacs, than
>> in a standard Mac 'word processor'.
>
>
>	To Tom:  Just what can't you do in MSWord 5.0 that you can do in emacs?
>
Ok.  First, I haven't seen MSWord 5.0 yet, and I am not a regular emacs user.
But, the sorts of things that I find that I can do easily in 'vi' that are 
unavailable in 'word processors' (which I differentiate from 'text editors'
like Alpha) include:

1) Global or incremental search-and-replace using regular expressions.  (I
   understand Nisus supports this, however).

2) 'Global' search-and-replace over limited regions of the document; in 'vi'
    you can specify the regions by their absolute or relative (to the cursor)
    line numbers.

3) Copy-and-paste using multiple named buffers.  (Most Mac apps support just
   the single clipboard)

4) Unlimited undo.  Emacs supports this, I think; Alpha supports it completely.
   Vi saves the last 10 (?) strings that you deleted in named buffers so that
   you can often undo a handful of multiple deletions, when neccesary.

5) Keyboard macros, i.e., assigning commonly used command sequences to a 
   single keystroke.  (I suppose you can recover this functionality on a Mac
   by buying a package like Quick Keys (sp?).)

   Vi always lets you redo the last command that modified text by hitting a
   single key.  This is often very convenient.

6) Multiple named 'marks'.  While editing a file, you can set marks at 
   important points throughout the file and jump to any mark with two 
   keystrokes.  This is very useful when you're editting programs, or reading
   a large file.  

Does MSWord now support any of these features in 5.0?  The features that I
particularly depend on are regular expression searches and keyboard macros,
and this is why I keep Alpha around.  Also, it's nice to be able to work
with a text document directly without wasting the time to convert to 
some word processor's document format (and back to TEXT format afterwards).

Finally, emacs (and Alpha) are completely extensible, since the provide an
underlying language in which you can add new functionality to the program.
If there's something that Word doesn't do that you decide you need, you're
stuck.  In emacs and Alpha you can often just implement it yourself.

Are there any more hard-core emacs (or vi) users out there who can give Scott
a more complete answer?

Tom

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Tom Pollard				Department of Chemistry
pollard@cucbs.chem.columbia.edu		Columbia University
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Tom Pollard				Department of Chemistry
pollard@cucbs.chem.columbia.edu		Columbia University
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