On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 07:16:24AM -0400, Nick Holland wrote: |Unix machine...it's like notepad in windows or edlin in MSDOS, you need to |know the core system, and if you really need something else, fine, but |you have to learn what is on the system. Learn vim, you have learned |what is in Linux, not what is in Unix. | |For the record: I maintain the FAQ using vi. I write scripts using vi. |When I stick my nose into code, I use vi. When I am teaching someone, |I teach them vi. vi is very capable. It does NOT limit what you |accomplish. | |I've had people encourage me to try vim. I've tried it. I didn't like |it...in part, because it was too close to real vi, but clearly not real |vi, so I started using it like vi, and it didn't "work". Plus, I found |some operational modes "quirky" and unexpected. Probably I could turn |knobs and make it work like I expect...but then, I've now got a |non-standard editor running in a non-standard way. No joy in that for |me... | |Nick. | Well I am writing this mail from my colorful vim view. I use mutt of course. I do agree that vim has bloat and is definitely slower than vi. I think the moment vi gets syntax highlighting I am willing to switch to vi.
Vim has several features that vi doesnt have but then vi seems to have all the important ones like reading and writing to files or portions of them. Vim does have rectangular cut and copy pasting from multiple buffers read from multiple files. These are not must have of course. I wouldn't miss these things in vi. The real killer to me at least is the excellent syntax highlighting for nearly single file format under the sun. And it does a very good job of it. It has bugs of course but 99% of the time it works well. Tell me how to get this in vi and I will gladly switch. regards, Girish -- Whenever people agree with me I always feel I am wrong. - Oscar Wilde