On Friday 23 November 2007 08:55:44 pm Mike Miller wrote: > On Fri, 23 Nov 2007, Josh Paetzel wrote: > > The reason that different editors exist of course, is that different > > people are productive in different ways. > > Another reason is that people make editors to make money or to promote > themselves, and they promote their product in various ways. So many > people use things that suck just because they are there. > > > I use vi/nvi/vim for all of my editing needs, and have done so for 15 > > odd years. In all of my UNIX travels I've run in to one box where one > > of those commands didn't start an editor....(and yes, it was a linux box > > ;) > > Do you mean that none of those commands started an editor, or do you > really mean that only one of the three did not start an editor? You > should vi on every UNIX/Linux system. Plenty of UNIX machines won't have > vim or nvi. > None of those commands started an editor. The only editor on the box I could find was nano. Also, for what it's worth, even on some stodgy conservative BSD distros, /usr/bin/vi has been a hard link to /usr/bin/nvi for over a decade. You'd be hard pressed to find a unix box that wasn't horrificly ancient that only had an actual vi on it. Generally speaking if there's a binary named vi it's either a link to nvi or vim, or if it is a real honest to goodness vi, then nvi or vim is also available seperately. > I do not recommend vi, gvim, etc. to students. I recommend emacs instead. > The reason is that vi was not developed for modern computers and it has an > unusual, unintuitive way of doing things. Emacs is easier to learn. I > also think it is easier to remember the keystrokes, and emacs keys are > used in the readline library and thus in many programs (like the bash > commandline). It is often possible to swich to vi command-line editing, > but then you have to switch and deal with the fact that other people have > not switched. That said, I have nothing against vi and would not > encourage a vi user to switch to something else. > > Mike > emacs wasn't developed for modern computers either.... My main complaint with emacs is that on a lot of unix and unix-like machines it's not installed by default. To me it's more of a programmer's editor, where you can control the environment you are using and install the tools that best suit you. If you're going to be doing admin work in the trenches, and especially if you deal with a variety of machines you're eventually going to run in to a situation where it would take longer to install emacs than to do the editing you need in an editor that's already installed....and when you look at all of the unix boxes out there in the field, the vast majority of them have some varient of vi as the only common denominator. bindkey -v for life! -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel PGP: 8A48 EF36 5E9F 4EDA 5A8C 11B4 26F9 01F1 27AF AECB -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20071123/bb5317ae/attachment.pgp