>>184
That's where you're wrong, usually the things that make the 1970s editors hard to use are things which also make them hard to figure out.
Again, as
>>183 excellently put it; the computer works for you, not you for it. If you have to read a manual to figure out how to do basic functions (cut and paste) then the editor FAILS.
We're not talking about advanced functions here; we're talking about cut and fucking paste.
Again, it all has nothing to do with mice; it has to do with the way in wich information is presented to the user. With a decent editor the user has to spend a very minimal amount of time figuring out what he needs to do to do the tasks he started the thing up for.
Again, VI and Emacs are pure, unadulturated Geek Wank. They serve no other purpose in this day and age than to display HOW FUCKING HARDCORE I AM LOL. Want something lightweight to throw on to a boot disk? there's nano or mcedit. Want something more powerful that you can use as an IDE? get UltraEdit. Want word processing? Get a word processor.
There is nothing which either emacs or vi is good at which is not done *better* by more modern editors with far better UIs (often CLI ones, at that) which don't require 500 hours in the manual or give you carpal-tunnel syndrome trying to save a file and quit (I'm looking at you, emacs).