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On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, Rick wrote:
Mike Miller wrote:
The reason I will never teach vi is that it is a ridiculous little
piece of junk -- that is how every student will see it. Learning it is
a waste of time for them. It is very awkward to use. It was designed
for use over a 300 baud modem, not for modern computing (I think I sent
the Bill Joy article about this a few weeks back). I know that
long-time users like vi, but they are just stuck in the past unable to
move forward.
How is never having to move your hands off the keyboard "awkward"?
Having multiple "windows" that you can easily move text back and forth
from, again, without ever moving your hands from the keyboard is tough?
I'm not sure that you know that emacs can do that too. The thing that's
"tough" (your word) is the idea that you have an input mode and a command
mode. That alone is enough reason not to teach this editor or to learn to
use it. It just doesn't do what you expect. You can go on and on about
its rich features, but emacs has that too and emacs doesn't have the
weirdness. In every editor I know of, other than vi, if you get the
cursor to a certain position, you can start typing and it works.
Frankly, I think this comes down to a usage issue. Many "sysadmin types"
will prefer vi for the simple reason that it allows them to do their job
more easily.
It is only easy for them because they already know how to use it. They
are used to it, so it is easy for them to use it. That isn't a good
reason to learn it in the first place.
It does for me. gVim gets installed on every box I own, windows *and*
linux, because it is hands down a better editor than note/wordpad.
No argument there. But it is not better than emacs, is it? Let's face
it, the truth is, you use gVim and you don't use emacs and you don't know
what your missing and all of your claims are based on ignorance of emacs.
The only real compeitition that I'm familiar with would be UltraEdit
(and that's largely due to the "select column of text feature" which can
pretty easily be replicated with a little sed/awk work).
Emacs can work with columns too -- copy, cut, paste, etc.
The other reason I will not teach vi is that I haven't used it in many
years and I don't really know it anymore and I don't feel any need to
learn it. The one thing worth knowing: How to get out of vi if the
system uses $EDITOR and puts you into vi for some reason.
Right, because ":q" is pretty tough.
I'm saying that is the one command worth knowing. And it is tough in a
way. Name another program that uses ":q" to exit! So you suddenly get
into some weird program and you don't know what to do. What's the first
thing you try? How about ":"? No. So it is worth teaching that ":q" is
a good way to get out of that POS.
I guess you don't use emacs so you don't know what you're missing.
I'm not sure what it means to say that Unix can do what emacs does. I
can't think of an interpretation of that statement that is true.
sed -e 's/vi/emacs/' mikes_above_paragraphs
Not so. I know that vi can do probably everything that emacs can do. I
don't care. I don't like the vi approach and I see no reason to use it.
I always wondered what the point was, then I read Bill Joy's article about
how he designed it for use over a 300 baud modem and I realized that there
really was no point to it -- not anymore.
People always say that emacs is "bloated." Sure, let's say that it is
bloated -- it does have tons of functionality. It will take about 40
MB on your HDD and a few unnoticable extra milliseconds to load on some
systems and it will use 11 MB of RAM when loaded in its own window or 9
MB when loaded in the current window. But this is 2007!! Even an
older machine will not have a problem with that. In other words, the
bloat is not noticable when comparing performance with nano.
The only reason to use nano is because you're on an embedded system that
can't handle vi. And, if it can't handle vi, then emacs is just plain
out.
It's not that I think vi can't do great things. I just see no reason to
recommend vi instead of emacs to a new user. Emacs is easier to use from
the beginning. In the end it has at least as much functionality as vi and
I think the add-on packages and elisp give you a lot more than you get
with vi for the very sophisticated user.
The thing that is missing in the Buford argument for vi is any reason to
*prefer* vi to emacs.
Here's one small reason to prefer emacs: The emacs keystrokes have been
adopted very widely by other programs, including the bash command line.
For some (e.g., tcsh and maybe bash) you can switch to a vi keystroke
system, but that is not their default and that option is not universally
available.
Mike
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