Re: [newbie] Vi vs Emacs... Not a flamewar!!! Any flames will beignored
On Thu, 06 Feb 2003 20:32:02 -0900 civileme [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But really I have always felt trapped in these discussions. I don't Me too!! believe there is really enough common ground to compare them. emacs is easier to get started with thanks to the tutorial built in, and vi is easier to master. emacs is at the same time a desktop, a shell, a scripting host, and a basically crash-proof word processor (Yep I was around when computers worked with 64K memory and MINCE+SCRIBBLE / Final Word II/Borland's SPRINT was a going enterprise and crashes were frequent, and that bound me closer to emacs, cause I always forgot to save on WordStar). Hell Civileme that dates us :-)) remember Wordmaster too?? Wordstar!! Now that's still my fallback for massaging large text files. I still find it amazing that a 64k executable with overlays could handle 16mb even in the cp/m days!! It's also the only editor (sic) I found which could move text in columnar mode. Mind you I've never had to try this since returning to *nix. Besides, I have an affection for wheat on dark slate gray that always looks green to me... :-) Yeah but that's to do with snow-blindnes isn't :-)) John (nz) Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
RE: [newbie] Vi vs Emacs... Not a flamewar!!! Any flames will beignored
On Mon, 2003-02-10 at 16:36, Robert Wideman wrote: 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. How about GEDIT if you have X working or PICO if in CLI??? Rob Haven't got PICO yet... get some weirdo thingy callled JPico tho... dunno where it came from... Gedit been playing with a bit. Loaded Rox yesterday and the POS defaults to VI!?! Ack! And I didn't know how to use Vi yet so I just closed it. I'll play with it AFTER I get through my list of things to get running/working/up/un-fucked/into shape somehow. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Vi vs Emacs... Not a flamewar!!! Any flames will beignored
On 10 Feb 2003 18:14:39 -0700 FemmeFatale [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 2003-02-10 at 16:36, Robert Wideman wrote: 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. How about GEDIT if you have X working or PICO if in CLI??? Rob Haven't got PICO yet... get some weirdo thingy callled JPico tho... dunno where it came from... Gedit been playing with a bit. Loaded Rox yesterday and the POS defaults to VI!?! Ack! And I didn't know how to use Vi yet so I just closed it. I'll play with it AFTER I get through my list of things to get running/working/up/un-fucked/into shape somehow. In ROX, right-click the file, Set run action, and type the name (or full path if the app isn't in your path) of the program you want to use. I use gedit for quick edits in gui. You can also drag and drop the executable to if you prefer. There has been talk that ROX might eventually let you choose multiple apps for opening a file type. Dunno if that will happen or not. You can also use the Send to feature. Again, right click, and you can work up a little script to send the file to a program. This is handy for example with Gimp, which will want to start up a whole new gui even if there's already a Gimp running. I send the files to gimp remote, and it opens in the already running Gimp. Todd Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Vi vs Emacs... Not a flamewar!!! Any flames will beignored
On Mon, 2003-02-10 at 18:58, Todd Slater wrote: In ROX, right-click the file, Set run action, and type the name (or full path if the app isn't in your path) of the program you want to use. I use gedit for quick edits in gui. You can also drag and drop the executable to if you prefer. There has been talk that ROX might eventually let you choose multiple apps for opening a file type. Dunno if that will happen or not. You can also use the Send to feature. Again, right click, and you can work up a little script to send the file to a program. This is handy for example with Gimp, which will want to start up a whole new gui even if there's already a Gimp running. I send the files to gimp remote, and it opens in the already running Gimp. Todd Thx I discovered some of that stuff today... wasn't sure how it worked though. Femme Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Vi vs Emacs... Not a flamewar!!! Any flames will beignored
civileme wrote: On Thursday 06 February 2003 06:46 pm, Mark Weaver wrote: Anders Lind wrote: OK I just read some stuff about VI Emacs. Now I'm not one for super complex editors of text. Having said that I realize it behooves me (Correct context for behooves? sp!?) to learn one or the other so I can edit files on any system. I realized a while back those 2 editors are standard to Any *nix environment. 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 Femme, Whether you're hackin code or just editing a file somewhere on the file system VI is the cat's meow. no question, and anyone how says different is just outa his/her tree. :) hmmm Well everyone has to test his wings eventually :-) I can hack code with either, but stub functions and compilation/debugging has to be easier to do from emacs... Of course some IDEs offer as much but usually for one language. I never know whether I will be using Python, C++, ada, pike, expect, tcl/tk, shell, lisp, or xbasic til I get into the problem, though these days Python is awfully attractive for anything but something requiring speed or scripts for eggdrop bots. With xbasic, I will use their IDE, cause it is like glade, coding functions to handle their widgets (which they call grids). And by now I am more comfortable with the arcane series of keystrokes for emacs, so that is what I use. When I go into unknown environments, I take an editor with me that will compile on almost anythinjg I don't already have a binary for and which offers multiple keybindings but a whole lot less p[ower than either emacs or vi. But really I have always felt trapped in these discussions. I don't believe there is really enough common ground to compare them. emacs is easier to get started with thanks to the tutorial built in, and vi is easier to master. emacs is at the same time a desktop, a shell, a scripting host, and a basically crash-proof word processor (Yep I was around when computers worked with 64K memory and MINCE+SCRIBBLE / Final Word II/Borland's SPRINT was a going enterprise and crashes were frequent, and that bound me closer to emacs, cause I always forgot to save on WordStar). Besides, I have an affection for wheat on dark slate gray that always looks green to me... :-) Civileme Man! I wanna be like you when I grow up!! exactly how long has it taken you to learn all those languages? I'm seriously awed by that list. -- Mark --- Paid for by Penguins against modern appliances(R) Linux User Since 1996 Powered by Mandrake Linux 8.2 9.0 Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Vi vs Emacs... Not a flamewar!!! Any flames will beignored
Benjamin Pflugmann wrote: On Tue 2003-02-04 at 21:21:06 -0900, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [... cool overview about available editors ...] If I am on a desktop and I need a quick edit, I usually grab for kedit, but any heavy work is emacs unless it is a sudoers file in which case a special variant of vi called visudo is absolutely the only way to do it without adding a session of hair-pulling getting things to work as you planned afterward. Well, just a clarification: visudo is not an editor, but only the Right Way to call an editor for the /etc/sudoers file. visudo will call anything you put in your EDITOR environment variable. So it will gladly use emacs, if you want it to (I assume, you know that civilme, but it was ambigous, IMHO). Now my personal opinion about editor choice: learn the most basic vi keystrokes - one day you will be glad to know how to edit a line and save it using vi, believe me. Although both emacs and vi (and variants) are very commonplace on UNIX, if only one editor is installed (e.g. on a minimal server), it will be vi. Aside from that, I prefer emacs for almost everything (startup speed and size are not really an argument with even yesterday's hardware). And it can do anything you want (news mail reading, shells, remote editing, file browsing, being a full IDE, some games, web browsing with(!) images... you name it). But both, emacs and vi, will take some time to learn. And setting them up to do everything the way you prefer will take some time and involves config files in a way or another. This only pays of, if you need to use them regularly (I do). If you want something with a short learning curve, nedit, kedit and friends are more suitable, but will show their limits somewhen. Bye, Benjamin. Ok, but how do you turn on number lines insise Emacs. If I've coding in Java and the compiler tells me I've got an OutOfBoundsException on line 4893 I don't want to have to count 1,2,3... from the top if the page, ya know? ;) -- Mark --- Paid for by Penguins against modern appliances(R) Linux User Since 1996 Powered by Mandrake Linux 8.2 9.0 Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Vi vs Emacs... Not a flamewar!!! Any flames will beignored
Jan Wilson wrote: * 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 makes a good point - it depends on what you want to do. If by edit files you just mean opening a file and making a few changes here and there, then pico (or nano) exists on just about any Unix-type server, and is really easy to use. If you've used pine, then pico is a piece of cake. The vi vs. emacs stuff only comes into play when you want to do more than type in a few lines of text here and there. On my own machine, I find kwrite the easiest, but then I'm not a serious coder - I just do bash and perl scripts. Remember that in kwrite you can save to remote locations, so you can use it to edit files on other machines. Sir Robin -- A Perl script is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you. - Larry Wall Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
