Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 19 Nov 2001 16:19:22 -0600
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
To:        dochawk@psu.edu
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Vi a Joke ? 
Message-ID:  <15353.34154.70535.751414@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <60230366@toto.iv>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
dochawk@psu.edu types:
> David dabbled
> > On Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Kent Stewart wrote:
> > > One point people forget and that is what can you use when you mess up
> > > rc.conf and your system will only boot into single user mode. Learning
> > > vi at that point is a painic :).
> > At that point it is nice to know how to use "ed". :-)
> as I found out the hard way a couple of months ago :)
> vim is on /usr, and if you're hitting single user becuase of a problem 
> with /usr, ed is all there is.  Fortunately, ed is rather obvious to 
> the vi user--I hadn't used it in over 15 years, and did just fine.

I still use ed regularly. If I'm going to make a one-line change on a
file I know fairly well, vi drawing the full screen is just a waste of
time. I run Xemacs as me for mail, programming, and most other
things. I tend to use vi as root for simple but not trivial
things. For really complex things, I'll edit a copy as me in emacs or
start emacs up. Does that make me trieditorial?

The article reminded me of a study done at Xerox on editors. They had
one test subject who was something much faster than anyone else,
whereas most others grouped close together, with relatively minor
variations compared to that. Turns out the subject in question was
just typing the correct sequence of commands without worrying about
seeing the results. Hard to beat that.

	<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Q: How do you make the gods laugh?		A: Tell them your plans.

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?15353.34154.70535.751414>