Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 20:26:02 -0500 (EST) From: Thomas Good <tomg@mailhost.nrnet.org> To: Mark Ovens <mark@ukug.uk.freebsd.org> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net>, James A Wilde <james.wilde@telia.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Programmers' editor? Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.96.991125201543.14551A-100000@mailhost.nrnet.org> In-Reply-To: <19991125192634.B316@marder-1>
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On Thu, 25 Nov 1999, Mark Ovens wrote:
> OK, I'll comment. Since this emacs v. vi thing has reared it's head
> again I used emacs instead of vi all day today (I even renamed vi, and
> symlinked it to emacs to force myself).
>
> After the first couple of hours finding my way around (much use of
> C-h) I got quite productive with it. The biggest difference I had to
> adjust to was the fact that it doesn't have a command mode, any non
> Ctrl-, Meta-, Shift-, Esc- chars you type go into the document, but
> once I got used to that it wasn't so bad.
Mark - I'm sitting here sipping a pint and scratching my head over
this. I'm wondering aloud why you'd be wanting to lose vi in favour
of emacs. (?)
First off, vi works well and most of us who use it, for whatever reason,
have significant chunks of time invested in getting the console to
stop beeping at us!
Secondly, I once heard a very convincing argument for learning and using
vi. If you get hired to work on a unix box, no matter what the
implementation, it will have vi. Not so emacs, at least not immediately.
I'm so used to vi (not claiming proficiency tho) that I make it the default
editor for email on the servers on my network. Got tired of PICO complaining
everytime I tried to go to command mode...or execute various commands
when I've forgotten where I was. ;-)
> PERL has been described as "the duct tape of the Internet"
> and "the Unix Swiss Army chainsaw"
Yes - quite true. For those of us who are incurable shell scripters, as
opposed to programmers, perl has the look and feel of C but we can still
manage to get something done!
BTW, I once thought about complaining to Larry Wall that Perl doesn't
have an application development environment (except for the windows
incarnation). Then it ocurred to me - it does. vi. ;-)
Cheers,
Tom Good
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