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Does anyone else find it deliciously ironic that, in such a pro-Unix article, Miguel recommends Mavis Beacon? According to Amazon, it's available only for Windows and OSX :p
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Why? vi isn't even the default editor on many Linux distributions anymore.
It is on Debian and CentOS server installs and is available on a Ubuntu default install. It's the common denominator. Why frig around with emacs, pico, nano etc when vi is always there and is the same?
$ ls -l ./etc/alternatives/editor
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 7 06:19 ./etc/alternatives/editor -> /bin/nano
(OpenBSD ships with both nvi and mg, FWIW.)
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.
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…
The thing is, though, the subset of vi you have to learn to is relatively small. You need to know how to enter and leave insert mode, how to delete, and how to quit with and without saving. (For a non-vi user, the difference between knowing and not knowing those simple things is significant)
This is generally enough to edit the few configuration files you may need to touch before you install emacs (network, sources.list, sudoers, etc).
So even though the use case is small and shrinking, the amount of "vi skill" you need is pretty low as well. There's really no good excuse to avoid it.
I would like to add the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide ( http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ ) as an incredible resource. It's obviously geared towards scripting but most of what it teaches is extremely useful for working in an interactive shell as well. I had been using linux and bash for years before I read it and I still picked up quite a bit when I finally got around to working through it.
— Tom Duff
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I'm serious, not trying to be an ass here: 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).
"Ed is the standard text editor."
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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.
> but a clone of norton commander was and always will be a joke why? P.S. - if you can answer without the elitist bullshit, people will probably stop down voting you.
The idea of MC never appealed to me so I admit I've never used it. When I see other people using it it seems awkward and slow, and the people using it never seem to know much about unix. Of course it could be that they just don't know the application well and it is in fact really fantastic. So my perception could be completely wrong.
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"Ed is the standard text editor."
Real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
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Yes. Actually, I don't understand why people emphasize on touch typing here. Engineering is not a data entry job.
It's not so much "touch typing", it's being efficient with the main tool (the keyboard) that you use to interact with the computer. You don't need to be a 60 wpm typist, you just need to be able to communicate without stopping everytime to find out where the "@" symbol is.
in a computer lab between pepper canyon and warren college at UCSD in 1991 it was written to type 'man man' and maybe even 'apropos' was written up there on a chalk board. I taught myself unix from the manual. A few years later, I learned perl starting with 'perldoc perldoc'.