Quote:
Originally Posted by smeezekitty
(Post 5118929)
No offense but it seems like you are the one that wants the last word in
I'd like to point out Vim is a lot better than straight VI. I can tolerate VI but VIM is less temperamental and more user friendly.
And why make the effort to switch if vi(m) does everything I need in an editor, and I am familiar with it?
:wq
|
Yeah, it occured to me that I might be coming off that way as well and that this discussion might be belong in a different thread than a popularity poll, but since the poll was a done deal just left it here.
Anyhow, the reason I keep adding is not so much to say that vi/m or Emacs should be the one true editor, as I've tried to take care to point out that each has their place. The thing that gets me is the fanboism of some (not all) who have these really tightly held opinions w/o having actually evaluated alternatives.
vi is great! Seriously! It was a godsend in it's day because you were petty elite to even have such a tool available in the first place and not have to use a typewriter (or pay someone else to drive the typewriter for you). I went to school in the west. Had I gone to school in the east I might have been on an lisp machine and Emacs would have been the godsend.
The point being that the hours spent learning either of these new fangled tools paid off in spades compared to typewriters & the tediousness of correcting errors with white out or erasers. Especially since some prof's refused to accept or graded you down for papers that were not type perfectly.
So I used vi a lot!! And later vim (wasn't invented and even later not typically installed on commercial unices). I, like many others, used what was there in our early environments. Familiarity with one tool kept me from exploring alternatives. And that strategy made sense because I had a lot of time invested in vi before I even knew alternatives existed! Many, many years later I got around to giving Emacs a real test drive. Yeah, I had to get over the vi/m way and spend time grokking the emacs way. But now I'm making a more informed choice.
Which brings me back to the fanboism. Seems to have become a cultural/social phenomenon. Maybe it's too much information, too much overload, too much work, not enough time, etc. But it does strike me as rather odd that people will spend untold hours tweaking their wm to look cool but never objectively evaluate the options of such an essential tool as a text editor. In the windows world it's Office and Word. Could you imagine being saddled with that? But then ignorance may be bliss if that is all you know. Opening your eyes might just make you more productive though. And yeah, I know that it's not a perfect analogy, but hopefully you get my meaning.
And finally, "The Linux Way" was "The Unix Way" long before linux was even a dream in Linus' eye so it's kind of funny for me to read that. In any case, I think we mostly abandoned that precept. I mean, just look at modern DE. That being said, emacs and vi/m both do one thing very well: Edit text! It just so happens that editing text is essential across a large variety of tasks, and having a unified, transferrable set of keybindings makes for much greater editing efficiency. Emacs does this by doing a lot of text related activies from within Emacs itself via various modes. Vi/m accomplishes same in a different way: ubiquity of vi/m on *nix made it the grandfather to many more independent specialized tools that utilize vi keybindings, and/or can call vi/m as their editor, e.g. Mutt.
Just some thoughts.... Hopefull it's apparent that I am not really trying to prove one or the other is superior but rather that I wish I'd evaluated the alternatives and made a better informed choice a bit sooner in my career. Does that make sense?
