I started to learn how to use vi and emacs. I noticed that a lot of people use pico to edit text documents and I want to ask you what text editor is the best (emacs, vi or pico).

Thanks!

Oh, dear! This is almost as asking which is best of Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

I've always used emacs, so I would say it's the best. There are so many strange key combinations in vi. Not at all as user friendly as emacs.

Regards
Martin

Surely Windows is best????


Not

I didn't intend to start a flame war here with my post. I'm writing this on a Windows machine. It's currently playing music that's fetched with Samba from my main Linux machine behind my back.

Martin

Vi is unfriendly but emacs is large, bloated some say, with loads of features. I'd say use emacs if you can't be bothered to learn vi, but vi is small and efficient. Don't know about pico, never used it.

If you use pine for your email, then you know how to use pico

I don't know how you can say emacs is user friendly. Both emacs and vi are very different from things like pico and notepad. I guess emacs has menus.

I use vi because I *hate* using meta keys. For me, continuously pressing CTRL-key combinations is slow and uncomfortable. vi is fast and if you spend a few days looking at a cheat sheet you'll pick it up quickly. Of course emacs can emulate vi keybindings.

This is a religious war. Check google groups for a few thousand opinions on the topic.

...and I *hate* that vi regards entering and deleting text as something apart from one another. I'm EDITING the file, for crying out loud!

You will always have a version of vi, so it's good to know the very basics.

My primary editor is JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs). It's a very light-weight (in the positive sense) emacs clone. I used to use it in DOS!!

Mark

Then use vim. You can delete while entering text.

I just tried it - it looks nice. Thanks!

are you Jonathan or Mark? I just wonder.

this link http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch13s02.html has a good discussion by Eric S Raymond of vi and emacs, among a few other editors.

I prefer emacs myself (as does esr). As for bloat, I just fired up gvim and vim and compared memory usage with emacs, using top. Emacs (which has been running for days with several buffers open) is using about 10 MB. Gvim (freshly started, not editing anything) uses 5MB and vim uses 3MB. The differences are insignificant on my 2 year old hardware. Mozilla uses 54 MB, for comparison. Maybe it would have mattered back in '92, but not now.

both emacs, vi are for programming i think.

notepad, or pico should be fine for non-programming editing.
(although i use emacs for writing a paper too)

it can take you 3-6month to get u familiarized with all the key bindings

I've been reading this for days (years?) and I finally got to that part. Still in the middle, chasing one of his indirect links. As someone who has a strange fascination with DOS's EDLIN, and, thus, ed, I figured I'd pass this on for any who may not have seen it.

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/lin...05.2/0026.html

I haven't laughed so hard in a *long* time as when it got to the sample 'editing session'.

So - screw both those bloated monsters. ED!!