From owner-freebsd-stable Sun May 30 12:42:32 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from vital.bleeding.com (vital.bleeding.com [206.251.12.170]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0F3AF14D48 for ; Sun, 30 May 1999 12:42:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jjwolf@bleeding.com) Received: from crimson (crimson [144.254.195.6]) by vital.bleeding.com (8.9.2/8.9.2) with SMTP id MAA10369 for ; Sun, 30 May 1999 12:42:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jjwolf@bleeding.com) Message-ID: <004f01beaad4$9b3234a0$06c3fe90@cisco.com> From: "Justin Wolf" To: References: <19990530022036.A10524@futuresouth.com> <19990530105652.A73222@ontario.mooseriver.com> Subject: Re: Ramblings from a Newbie... Date: Sun, 30 May 1999 12:42:22 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Since it's a holiday, I'll add my two cents to this rambling conversation... > > Yes, and as we all know, Emacs stands for Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift :) > > EMACS == Eighty Meg And Constantly Swapping ;-) In regards to vi's user-unfriendliness: I used to use Pico, but as more and more of my efforts were spent editing files on a Unix machine, I started to develop disdain for such an underpowered editor (as it's meant to simply edit email messages for pine, it doesn't really need to be all-powerful). At first, vi seemed unwieldly... far too many key presses, why aren't there menus, and where the hell is the online-help? After struggling with vi for a while and trying to find things in the man page, I bought the little O'Reilly 'Learning the vi Editor' handbook. It taught me most of what I know today. I can get around vi with enough comfort that I use it any time I find myself editing things on a unix box. And vi is small enough that it loads pretty damn quick. As with Unix itself, once you learn the basics, you can combine them for amazing amounts of power. Now if only it had column cut & paste... I tried EMacs, even xemacs... I'd have to spend a lot more time reading documentation and fiddling about just to figure out how to exit to application (programs of this size are no longer mere 'programs' - they're applications). Most of the power of emacs is lost on me... my brain is not big enough to grasp the concept. I've heard of people who actually use emacs as their command-line shell. I used to edit web pages with notepad.exe... now I use vi. I'm much happier. (I still use pine though...) -Justin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message