I must argue this. VI is a very powerful and useful tool if you take the time to
learn it. try reading the man page and you will find that if does not open every
document read-only, you just haven't done enough research to know how to use it. I
will take vi over any editor out there, for the sole fact the I can do all the editing
(adding, cutting, pasting, moving, deleting) without moving my hands. All the
commands are done with one or two keystrokes very easily. Before you bash vi, maybe
you should do some research. I would be glad to hear replies to this, however, due to
time restraints, I am no longer subscribed to this list, so please send them to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Thank you for your time.
Will Trepanier
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Derbyshire [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2000 11:45 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [newbie] RE: your mail
At 10:08 AM 2/10/00 -0000, you wrote:
>use vi, type vi <filename> at a command prompt, useful commands are:
>
>:write - to save
>:quit - to quit
>:quit! - to force quit
>
>btw. you will probably hate it :)
Shame on you, suggesting than a new user use vile and then giving an
inadequate warning. I stumbled on vile once on some machine or other where
I had a shell account. Yugh. It doesn't work the way you'd expect (for
example, you can't open the file, arrow around, and type new text; as near
as I can tell it opens all files in a read-only mode and expects a command
to be issued to change it) and there's no help to be had hitting F1 and no
helpful status line on the screen telling you what key you should hit for
documentation -- bad interface design, since the interface should work the
way people are used to (e.g. for an editor, arrow around and type stuff,
shift-arrows to select, etc.), and shouldn't require a mini-course from
Algonquin or thorough reading of the manual. Manuals/help files are for
reference and how-to, not for basic explaining of the interface. I think
whoever perpetrated vi was the same idiot who perpetrated Lotus Notes (see
http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.html IIRC -- if that's 404, try just
http://www.iarchitect.com and click the nice icon of a bomb ;-)).
PICO, on the other hand, is an okay shell editor.
If it's not on your system, you'll probably find it on rpmfind.net
somewhere under 'p'.
Kedit, of course, works in a way that should be familiar to users of modern
graphical systems like 'doze and MacOS. Except for a quirk in that it seems
to clobber the clipboard spuriously sometimes, especially if you select
something -- meaning if you do the usual "select in window A, hit ctrl-C,
switch to window B, select some old crud, and hit ctrl-V to replace the old
crud with the stuff from window B" it won't work in kedit or the derivative
kwrite :-(
--
.*. "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not
-() < circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a
`*' straight line." -------------------------------------------------
-- B. Mandelbrot |http://surf.to/pgd.net [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_____________________ ____|________ Paul Derbyshire
Programmer & Humanist|ICQ: 10423848|
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