hmm. I think that's what a bunch of us have been saying.

It pays to know vi if you are responsible for keeping servers up. Of course, if you're not, and you just want to play with linux, then do whatever you want. Nothing to stop a sysadmin from using nano or emacs either, but they're putting themselves at risk if they don't also know vi.

beat me to it. why i learned vi(m) is simple. just about every *nix system i have logged into has it and if i need to change something i KNOW i can. nano is not intuitive either for that matter, but then before i started linux i never did much text editing so no text editor is "intuitive" for me.

i still have to keep a cheatsheet page up when i am doing anything more then basic commands but that is more that i do not code but once every few months and tend to forget the commands due to lack of use.

my point was really that once you have learned it is pretty easy to just keep using it. by now its reflexive and I need to look at the charts for nano, so its actually easier for me to use vi. and yeah I know some of those sentiments have already shared too, but its slow at work today.

I agree it's not initially intuitive at all but it's just about always available if you're not on windows..

You can have it on Windows too, if you really want to suffer...

Speaking of that (Windows, that is)... Anyone else notice that the ancient "edit.com" DOS editor is so much better than either notepad or wordpad (which are much newer)?

I use EditPad Lite on Windows instead of Notepad. Never tried edit.com - will do, just out of curiosity.

"edit" is the best m$ text editor, MUCH better than notepad (it's rather a joke) and wordpad (a kind of "word sub-processor" useful just to read the "readme" files of m$ software).
It is almost the same editing environment used in the m$ programming languages in the pre-win era. I don't know if it can handle unicode characters or just ascii.

Better was BRIEF editor, that included its own script language (c-like), with many programming help tools (and the ability to handle up to 2 billion lines of text file). I don't know if there are any newer versions.
Of course, we always have to remember norton editor

Whenever I have to use Windows, I find myself installing SciTE.

Am I the only one who does not really care about a text editor? I use vim only for basic system configuration. If I am going to write a book, I will use a good word processing application. If I am going to program something, I will be using an IDE.

The only advantage vi has (over many other editors) is that you can always count on it on any Unix-machine. But it is not like I think vi (or any other text editor) are something to get too political about, leave it alone argue which text editor is "the best thing in the World". I just edit what I have to, remotely or localy with vi, ESC:wq and that is IT. And the way Linux is going, doing this kinda of editing is getting less necessary (better hardware detection and configuration tools. It was also about time by the way).

And just to let the fire going: if there was a list or pool of the top-ten most overrated creations of all time (hmmmmm, I should create one), you bet I'd vote for vi in that one...

lol tis true,
i am using Vim for a bit of programming ATM because im logged on to a remote server with ssh.
i cant stand emacs and nano/pico dousent have santax highlighting


yes i know i could ssh -X and run gedit/kate but i cant be bothered!

Syntax highlighting for nano:

http://wiki.linuxhelp.net/index.php/...x_Highlighting

My understanding is that the edit.com editor is the old qbasic IDE/editor with the qbasic specific stuff stripped out.

I had another text editor called "EDIT" that I test drove a LONG time ago (shareware). Very nice, but I didn't have the $10-20 to buy it back then, so I didn't keep it.

I still use the old Mix Software editor at home... Talk about old, it's a DOS app that was essentially a simple port from CP/M 80! Does exactly what I need though.

Has anyone tried notepad2 for Windows? It is pretty much like notepad, but has syntax highlighting and other few enhancements. Again, I don't use an editor much, but I do think that Windows should be shipped with at least something like that

There's dozens of text editors available for Windows, all of the better than Notepad.