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Emacs for the
EVE User
Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX.
- Tom Christiansen

Why Emacs?

Emacs1 has a long and venerable history dating back to the 1970's. It was originally a set of editor macros on top of TECO2, a text editor written at MIT on a Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) PDP-10 computer system. TECO itself continued to be a widely used editor on Digital's PDP-11 and DECsystem computers while Richard Stallman (founder of the Free Software Foundation) modeled a new version of Emacs (GNU Emacs) after the original. Stallman's new version was written in a dialect of the LISP programming language, itself another MIT invention.

With Digital's introduction of the VAX/VMS systems, DEC promoted use of its existing visual editor EDT ported from its PDP-11 operating systems. TECO had also been migrated to VMS, but as an unsupported product. Folklore has it that TECO was not originally intended to be ported to VMS, but had to be because some basic system utilities written by the Digital system engineers depended upon it.

Within a few years after the launch of VMS, DEC introduced a new editor called EVE3 which was written using a new Digital programming language called TPU (Text Processing Utility). Anyone familiar with Emacs quickly saw that EVE was, if not closely modeled, at least heavily influence by the design and interaction policies of the Emacs editor. Because of this, for folks migrating to a non-VMS operating system, GNU Emacs is the most logical choice for any experienced user of DEC's EVE or LSE4 editors. Notice I did not specifically say migrating to a Unix system. While GNU Emacs is available for virtually every flavor of Unix that exists, it also runs under MSDOS, Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Atari, and of course, VMS. This makes Emacs a good tool to know for any computer professional working across multiple operating systems.

What About vi?

If you already know vi, then there is probably no compelling reason to learn Emacs instead. However, two experimental studies demonstrated that Emacs is the easier of the two to learn for folks unfamiliar with either. Emacs is also widely seen as being more powerful than vi, but let's not start any holy wars on the topic, please. Suffice it to say that the primary advantages of vi are consistency and availability, on Unix that is.

In a nutshell vi is a good choice for a Unix system admin. Program coders, on the other hand, should find Emacs much more useful.

Or you could learn ed :-)

Emacs Resources for the EVE User

General Emacs Resources

Books

Links

FootNotes:
1 Emacs = Editor MACroS
2 TECO = Tape Editor and COrrector and then later Text Editor and COrrector
3 EVE = Extensible VAX Editor or Easy Visual Editor
4 LSE = Language Sensitive Editor