Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 06:32:24 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@hamby1.lightside.net> To: chuckr@Glue.umd.edu, cat@uunet.ca Cc: terry@lambert.org, jehamby@lightside.com, coredump@nervosa.com, winter@jurai.net, freebsd-current@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: editors Message-ID: <199605231332.GAA00528@hamby1.lightside.net>
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> Am I correct in assuming that you're talking about a new user who is learning > how to setup and administrate unix? If so, then what is the aim of the > freebsd project - are we trying to make the OS as 'user friendly' as the > Windows world? ...or is there an ongoing intention to get people past the > simplistic nature of the microsoft 'os's? > > If it's new users on a system, what difference does it make :> That's just > site choice :> > > c. Well, this is a good point. I don't think it's THAT hard to learn "h, j, k, and l move the cursor around (although our vi also supports cursor keys :-), i or a insert or append text at that location, ESC gets you back to command mode, :wq means save and quit, and :q! means quit, don't save." In a perfect world, you would have your choice of editor at all times (and a fully X-based install, like Solaris), but the hard reality is that all of the established Unixes expect the administrator to have some competance with vi. Hmm, well I suppose with Solaris you could "/usr/openwin/bin/openwin" and "textedit", and I do know Unix admins (not competant ones :-) who use textedit and filemgr for their system maintainance. Just a scary thought. If there is room, and we can include pico in /stand or /usr/bin, that may be a good idea in the short term to get some people new to Unix able to edit config files without simultaneously painfully learning a new editor. However, in the long term, we should probably be encouraging new administrators to learn the standard tools so they will have the knowledge to administer other Unix-based systems (e.g. SunOS is a small jump from FreeBSD, of course SVR4 is much different but they both have in common vi). My other point is that ee wasn't much better than vi, from what I can tell, and confusing to myself to see it pop up when you run, e.g. vipw, although of course I knew how to change $EDITOR. Maybe the best thing to do is a very brief vi command summary in the documentation built into sysinstall? ---Jake
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