From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Sep 14 10:25:12 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id KAA26273 for questions-outgoing; Sat, 14 Sep 1996 10:25:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Arizona.EDU (Penny.Telcom.Arizona.EDU [128.196.128.217]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id KAA26268 for ; Sat, 14 Sep 1996 10:25:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sun1paztcn.wr.usgs.gov by Arizona.EDU (PMDF V5.0-5 #2381) id <01I9GRTT6PO0CRIQEM@Arizona.EDU>; Sat, 14 Sep 1996 10:24:50 -0700 (MST) Received: from localhost by sun1paztcn.wr.usgs.gov (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA10576; Sat, 14 Sep 1996 10:23:31 -0700 (MST) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 1996 10:23:30 -0700 From: Doug Wellington Subject: Re: Easy editors In-reply-to: "Your message of Sat, 14 Sep 1996 18:53:00 +0700." <1.5.4.16.19960914185310.290f2636@student.udd.htu.se> To: Henrik Johansson Cc: questions@freebsd.org, doug@sun1paztcn.wr.usgs.gov Message-id: <9609141723.AA10576@sun1paztcn.wr.usgs.gov> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING Possible religious battle ahead! Potential flame war! ;-) WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING Previously: >I am used to DOS, and I would like to know if there are any EASY >editors available for Freebsd? The DOS Edit program is so much easier >to use than vi and emacs, which makes me wonder if the goal of Unix >programmers has been to make things as insane and user-unfriendly as >possible? What other reasons could there be? Ding, ding, ding! Correct answer! You are indeed right, it IS to make things as insane and unfriendly as possible! ;-) Seriously though, there is a definite method to the madness with both vi and emacs - they are both extremely powerful. Orders of magnitude above the DOS editor. If you don't want all the power that vi and/or emacs provides, and you just want a quickie little easy editor, I would suggest using pico, which comes with the pine email package... I've also seen an editor called ne (nice edit?) but I don't know where you would find it... If you are going to start using an editor for lots of work, I think that you'll be much better off making the investment to learn vi or emacs. I suggest learning at least some vi, because it is on virtually all Unix boxes (just like edlin was on all DOS boxes). Emacs is arguably more powerful than vi, but it is also bigger (takes longer to start up) and it may not always be available on all Unix boxes... -Doug Doug Wellington doug@sun1paztcn.wr.usgs.gov System and Network Administrator US Geological Survey, Tucson, AZ Project Office According to proposed Federal guidelines, this message is a "non-record". Hmm, I wonder if _everything_ I say is a "non-record"...? FreeBSD and Apache - the best real tools for the virtual world! Check out www.freebsd.org and www.apache.org... Chuck - Lord of Darkness? Or Lord of Cuteness?