As I've said before, I suspect that emacs- and perl-users are actually the higher life forms; it's just that I don't know how to use them and so keep falling back on vi and the other tools that I already know...
As a general answer to pll's queries: vi can't necessarily do all the goofy things that emacs can do, but it is surprisingly powerful. And I'm just talking about "plain old" vi; vim has tricks up its sleeve that you'd never suspect. If I had to name some of my favorite vi characteristics I'd have to say its regular expression handling and particularly its feed-specified-region-as-stdin-to- arbitrary-program-and-replace-that-region-with-the- resultant-stdout trick. The latter means that you can do anything with any text in any vi buffer that you could do with any arbitrary program that processes its stdin and spews something useful via its stdout. Therefore, the answer to most of pll's queries is "yes" (though YMMV) because you can sort, columnize, reformat, etc, with programs like sort, cut, ls, tbl, indent, fmt, etc. And if there isn't already a program that does what you want, you can write one. For example, I wrote an awk script to do similar sorts of tabularization trickery that somebody already showed emacs to be capable of. I must say, the (results of) that emacs trick look prettier than mine, but that just reflects the (lack of) effort I put into that coding that script; it did what I needed. The way you use the bufferStdinStdoutSubstitution trick is to (A) specify the buffer and then (B) inform vi which program to execute. You accomplish A by placing the cursor on a line and saying ! followed by any normal vi motion command. vi will then (B) invite you to say which program you'd like the implied buffer to be fed to as stdin. EXAMPLE: Since saying } means goto-end-of-paragraph you can reformat a paragraph (for example) by placing the cursor on the first line of a paragraph and saying !}fmt -1 | sort -fdu | fmt -55 which means "feed this paragraph as stdin to the fmt program and replace it with fmt's output" . _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
