From owner-freebsd-newbies Mon Mar 12 11: 2: 1 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from odin.acuson.com (odin.acuson.com [157.226.230.71]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DBEB537B719 for ; Mon, 12 Mar 2001 11:01:55 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from djohnson@acuson.com) Received: from acuson.com ([157.226.47.12]) by odin.acuson.com (Netscape Messaging Server 3.54) with ESMTP id AAA5C11; Mon, 12 Mar 2001 11:06:51 -0800 Message-ID: <3AAD1D20.48F149B1@acuson.com> Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 11:01:52 -0800 From: David Johnson Organization: Acuson X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.5.1 sun4u) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Doug Young Cc: FreeBSD-newbies Subject: Re: Enough is enough (emacs vs vi) References: <00ed01c0aa0c$c386e160$0200a8c0@apana.org.au> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Doug Young wrote: > > I've always wondered why whoever it was that developed VI had to make > it so obtuse ... Obtuse? Maybe I'm dating myself, but I can remember the day when vi was considered to be very user friendly. At one time, line editors were all there were. Even DOS had only edlin once upon a time. Compared to what was available, vi was a breath of fresh air. Most terminals back then had only alphanumerics and ESC. No ALT, no CTRL, no arrow keys. Which is why you use hjkl to move around and have to switch between editing and command modes. If the all of the terminals back them had Meta keys I'm sure Bill Joy (the whoever it was) would have used them to make it simpler. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message