A specific example: Oxford

http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/courses/computer_science/computer_science_.html

Cambridge is a less good example because in the first year they make you do other stuff:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/intro/

(20 years ago or so, CS didn't exist in the first year, so you had to apply to do something else then change subjects. Now you can spend _part_ of your first year
doing it.)

Imperial College, London:

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ugprospectus/facultiesanddepartments/computing/computingcourses

And how about Pisa:

http://www.di.unipi.it/

This general ed / "distribution" thing sounds ghastly. Being permitted to take courses outside your subject? Fine. Being forced to? Bleah.

There are various European countries where distribtion / gen ed doesn't exist,
though of course I don't know how realistic an option that might be for the original poster.

"trying to figure out how to type"? In emacs? There's nothing to figure out.

Learning how to use vi or emacs in the most basic way possible takes, oh,
seconds?

All you _need_ for vi is "i", "x", "dd", "wq", "a", and that's pretty much
all I've bothered to learn. emacs is even easier.