Most of the people who used vi that came into cisco to work on IOS would switch. vi can’t keep up with the sheer amount of stuff a person needs to do in a system of that size (at the time I was hot and heavy into hacking IOS, it was 18 to 19 million LOC and growing rapidly). It would be funny to watch them flail around like someone drowning who is only able to dog-paddle. We’d take pity on them, take a week of our time and teach them how to use modern tools to deal with it.
I started using Emacs when I worked in a Lisp environment (NIL - “New Implementation of Lisp”, which was a precursor to Common Lisp). Using Emacs on a character display isn’t as slick as the Genera environment on a Symbolics lisp machine, but it gets you most of the way there. Genera... now that was a system way, way ahead of it’s time.
If you can't see it on one terminal screen, you've overcomplicated it.
BTW, how's that CISCO thing working out for you?
I marked CISCO/Linksys off my authorized vendors list back in June, when they busted (hard) the power draw specs on a switch.
Don't mess with a man with a power budget based on solar panels. He don't have anywhere to go.
/johnny