From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jun 11 10:40:22 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from opie.usu.edu (opie.usu.edu [129.123.1.150]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3631537B403 for ; Mon, 11 Jun 2001 10:40:19 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from hal@cc.usu.edu) Received: from [129.123.1.184] ("port 49686"@buffy.usu.edu [129.123.1.184]) by cc.usu.edu (PMDF V5.2-32 #30472) with ESMTP id <01K4N0X7T8Z4B6319N@cc.usu.edu> for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Mon, 11 Jun 2001 11:40:13 MDT Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 11:40:09 -0600 From: Hal Lynch Subject: Re: vi In-reply-to: To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Message-id: MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" References: Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >Hi All: > >Why is vi the default choice of editor for UNIX and how did it become >the default? I find it cumbersome. > >I'm just curious of it's advantages over joe or pico or any of the >others. I will confine my comments to Programming editors not word processing. I'm not sure of joe but pico has annoying limitations. Vi has been on every unix, unix clone, dos, and VMS system I have used for 20 years. The same is not true for most of the editors found today. Having one editor you can use everywhere has a certain attraction. IMHO when vi was written it was better than the competition, so I learned vi. Over the years I have tried enough 'new' editors that I have forgotten their names. None would do everything I wanted it to do so I stuck with vi. I no longer derive pleasure by learning a new editor, so I stick to vi. Almost every editor I have tried does some things better/easier than vi but none do everything that vi does; at the same time being universally available. To labor the point a bit more, a few of my colleagues are new to the world of unix and of course they hate vi. Well they are now in the editor of the week club trying to find something that will do everything that they need to do. They are not having much luck yet but they are trying. True a few wrong characters, or the right characters typed at the wrong time, will do amazing things to a file, but you can do what you want to do, and you can do it on virtually any OS you use. hal PS anyone know of a vi clone that runs on Windows 2000? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message