* FemmeFatale <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [030205 01:27]: [snip] > edit files on any system. I realized a while back those 2 editors are > standard to Any *nix environment.
I believe that emacs is not always installed, even though it is probably available for almost all OSes and distributions. It isn't quite as universal as vi/vim. > OK... so whats the real diff between those 2 editors & which one is more > newb friendly? If neither is newbie friendly, well name something that is > and is more or less standard on most *nix's. For the moment I'm leaning to > Emacs b/c it is modeless & ergo less of a headache/more intuitive. Neither is as "friendly" as Notepad, which is "friendly" because it doesn't do much ;-) I like vim a lot, and use it for almost everything that doesn't require a word processor. Vim (or at least the minimal vi) is almost always present. Even LEAF Bering's editor has a vi mode (maybe emacs too, I didn't check that). The essential thing to learn about vim is to use the modes. Once you get used to it, you find there are things that are easier to use in insert mode, other things easier in normal mode (where keystrokes are commands rather than insertions of text), still others in ex mode (sort of a command line for vim), and there is also a visual mode, which is very much like highlighting. If you play with it, and pay attention to what is happening, you'll notice that actually most powerful text editors, even those built into word processors, have modes ... they just don't identify them as such. When you highlight a word or phrase, either with mouse or keyboard, and then press a key, it does something different from normal insert mode, right? And if you accidentally press the insert key, you enter an overstrike mode, where again, keystrokes are doing something different from normal. Among my students, at least, I don't think I have ever seen one that entered overstrike mode intentionally ;-) Many people use less than 1% of the capabilities of a text editor. I have seen people who noticed they left out a word at the beginning of the paragraph, and backspaced over the whole paragraph to add the word, then typed the rest of the paragraph again. For folks like these, the simplest text editor would be overkill. I would recommend vi or vim for anyone who does a lot of text editing (as opposed to word processing) and is willing to learn the basics (a good basic tutorial should take 30 minutes or less) and then gradually pick up more advanced features as you find you need them. It is also very useful for SysAdmins or consultants who have to work with many Unix/Linux boxes, or want a decent text editor they can use on either Linux or Windows. Most of what I have said can also be said of emacs. It's much larger, though with faster computers the load time shouldn't be a factor ... it'll load much faster than OpenOffice.org ;-) Emacs reminds me a little of mc (midnight commander) ... it tends to become a shell of its own, doing everything in its own way. I have used it enough to know that it does about the same things using control key sequences that vim uses with different modes. You will find plenty of emacs people who like it a lot, and those who think cooledit or even pico does everything they need. To summarize, I find vim is extremely powerful, virtually universal in the *nix world and available for virtually all platforms, with a steep but very short learning curve (the modes thing), and I like it a lot. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com & linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML
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