Thanks, it worked!
I put that line in /etc/bashrc at the end, it seemed to make more sense
to me since it is the main bash set up file for the system. It's easier
for me to remember where it is.
I tried typing it in at a shell prompt and it worked OK till I exited
the console, so it needs to be in the bashrc file. I hope this saves
some people some time. Hint: In vi press ESC then SHIFT and Q to get out
with save. In vim, press ESC then :qw to get out with save. Just in case
someone else gets stuck.
Some people missed the points I was making and now I know why Linux is
going to have problems as long as the people who write programs for it
don't drop this geeky attitude.
1. Make it easy for non "sys admin" types to use.
2. "sys admin" types that live for this command line stuff can spend
their life away re-configuring "easy" Linux distros to be as geeky as
they want, or simply install a geeky distro (redhat 5.0 comes to mind).
You could include a shell script with every distro called
"run-this-for-a-total-geek-system.sh", make it remove X, KDE and all GUI
stuff and install the latest version of vim (so they have all the
features available, wouldn't want even one left out, it has to do
everything, include the kitchen sink too). Make sure you DONT prompt
them "this script program will remove lots of files, do you want to
continue?", because geeks seem to love it when all their work is lost.
Gives them a excuse to not have a life sitting at a old DEC VT100
terminal punching paper tape on lpt-01 (ASR teletype, 110 baud).
I may not have made it clear that Mandrake changed the default editor
from vi to vim. vi was easier to get out of, compared to :qw (whatever
planet those programmers came from is real strange) and Mandrake just
went too far with 7.1 using vim.
Pico has been around for as long as I can remember (more than 20 years),
probably as long as vi. I doubt it's very big. At least it shows the
commands (like the important EXIT one)....
and does a very *strange* thing, it asks if you want to save your work
if you made any changes. Immagine that! What a feature!
Don't worry, vim will do that in another 20 years ;)
I remember doing something in vim, trying to exit with save, and it said
something about "text modified" so it wouldn't let me out (like a bad
nightmare) and said "try q! instead", so I did, and lost my work. "q!"
means "quit now and forget you spent all that time typing because it's
gonna be lost without warning". Tell me that's not LAME!
Mandrake, it's not cool to do this to your new "converts" / customers,
please change the default editor, thanks. No "newbie" or even a "oldbie"
like me is going to use a command line editor for much else than a
emergency quick one line edit, been there, done that back in 1978 and
don't want to go back. If someone does want to live in the past, let
them change it.
No one ever said where the actual setting was for the default editor, I
am only changing it after the fact with bashrc. Where is it actually set
up?
Rial Juan wrote:
>
> If you want another editor (let's assume pico in our example), put
> this line somewhere in /etc/profile:
> export EDITOR="pico"
>
