41–50 of 128 posts
Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.
Why? vi isn't even the default editor on many Linux distributions anymore.
Why frig around with emacs, pico, nano etc when vi is always there and is the same?
Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.
Why? vi isn't even the default editor on many Linux distributions anymore.
Is emacs?
It seems to me that both religions are not 'standard' anymore. I tend to see pico, nano, joe etc. - occasionally vi (but not vim).
Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.
though you wont find either on your fresh gentoo install
Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.
Any "Unixy" thing you have around these days will have more resources than most computes did in the mid 90s, and the need for a "lightweight" editor like vi is much, much smaller now than it was back then. Even my Buffalo router has nano.
For most Linux distros you install, you typically have nano, pico, joe, jedit or emacs or lots of other editors which (apart from emacs which is its own universe) largely follows the same conventions and at large gives transferable skills. These are IMO much more useful to know.
Why should I bother learning an archaic, non-standard editor from an era when "line-editors" were considered bloated? Why should it even be considered "relevant" today? Even more so, why should it be considered "essential"?
I really don't agree and I really don't see why vi-users insist everyone need to learn their favourite editor.
Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.
FTA: "If you learn to use Emacs, you will automatically learn the hotkeys and keybindings in hundreds of applications in Unix."
His point here is not to learn Emacs because it's a good editor, but because the keystrokes transfer to "hundreds of applications in Unix."
Which is true enough. In the (bash etc) shell you can change that to vi keystrokes with set -o vi, and you can change the behavior of those hundreds of applications (like mysql, e.g) by having a .inputrc file, but by default, lots of those apps use emacs keystrokes.
Use whatever editor you want, for whatever reason you want. His suggestion is worth considering, for the reason he states.
Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.
Why? vi and its derivates has their own (weird) usage-convention which you will find in no other software anywhere on the planet. Learning them gives you very few transferable skills. Any "Unixy" thing you have around these days will have more resources than most computes did in the mid 90s, and the need for a "lightweight" editor like vi is much, much smaller now than it was back then. Even my Buffalo router has nan…
Arrgghhh!
man readline, and search (/) for inputrc.
ANY app that uses readline can be set to use vi OR emacs keystrokes and history, by setting an entry in .inputrc. If you use either editor regularly this will set your command line skills in lots of software all over the planet to warp speed.
If you write python command line programs, try "import readline."
Harumph!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this argument might have held weight once, I think these factors undermine it: Emacs used to be considered 'expensive' in terms of disk/memory. These days, it really isn't. Non-Linux unixes are less and less of a factor these days, and even most of those have some sort of packaging system where installing emacs is a quick operation, rather than a laborious download/compile/install. Emacs itself has remote editi…
If you use a default server install of debian, ubuntu or centos, it doesn't have emacs installed. The installation media and recovery CDs don't either. That is enough justification, especially when you're at a single user mode console on a ILO card when the machine won't boot and flames are coming out of everything. Vi is there for you and emacs SSH won't be saving you when the network is not up so you cant apt-get o…
Are most people not touch typers? I've noticed my boss isn't really a touch typer, despite programming since before I was born, but I always assumed the majority of CS people were.
You'd be surprised how many senior-level people are hunt and peck typers. I've met several software engineers with 10+ years of experience who don't type with all 10 fingers (assuming they have that many).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that the same person wrote both this blog post and Midnight Commander.
and that validates midnight commander as a tool with the unix philosophy how? downvote all you want. but a clone of norton commander was and always will be a joke. ...saw several sysadmins using it to delete files named with dash because they didn't know "--" is posix for stop taking flags. and that's just one bad vice it foments.
why?
P.S. - if you can answer without the elitist bullshit, people will probably stop down voting you.