Re: Gotta Learn Vi . . . . . . (was Re: [tlug] [Newbie] Becoming'root'in Kubuntu: Use sudo)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > I expect that at 300 bps the big advantage of vi over Emacs at the time
 > was the screen update optimizer. Curses, the standard library for this
 > sort of thing, was developed from vi's screen update code, as far as I
 > know.

Could be, but in fact modern curses doesn't do that much useful
optimization.  What's really important in redisplay is being able to
preempt redisplay when you (the editor program) know that the screen
is just going to get trashed again before the user issues another
command.  Both Emacs (in 1979 Emacs was still TECO-based) and vi do
that, although in a very brutal way: provide powerful programmable
editing commands that do a lot of work automatically before
redisplaying.

If vi had any great advantage over Emacs in those days, I would
suspect it came from modality, which made the user's behavior a lot
more predictable.

I remember that with TECO Emacs on a Sufficiently Slow Line I would
often optimize long inserts by first splitting the line, inserting a
lot of text, then deleting the newline.