> what do you mean by vi vs. emacs? People actually use emacs when
> there's an alternative like vi?
Again, I like the right tool for the job... I use vi frequently. I
learned vi back in 1984. It rocked. I used to have macros bound to my
terminal(!)'s function keys to kick off a make and suck the errors into
the buffer so I could fix my typos. vi is an extremely powerful editor
and I really like it.
I also use emacs. I think a lot of people fear emacs because it's big
and complicated. I first used it in 1987 at my first "real" job (we
never ran it at school because the VAX only had 1MB of RAM and getting
a couple instances of emacs going would kill the machine). All of my
co-workers were using emacs, while I was editing one file at a time
with vi. Finally, I bit the bullet, sat down, and worked through the
tutorial. I found that emacs was a great editor, especially when
working with a multi-file project. etags, compile mode, and the auto
indentation facility (tweakable to match our company's preferred
indentation style) all together made emacs a great development
environment. The only thing I didn't care for was it was big and took
a while to start up. Generally, you'd crank up an emacs session and
keep it running the whole day, so that wasn't such a big issue.
I continued to use vi (and even "ed" on occasion... btw, I don't think
you can really call yourself a senior unix admin if you don't know ed,
but that's another topic of discussion). I liked vi because it was
fast. It started up in an instant, and I knew how to drive it and do
complicated things with it. I've had, on several occasions, a junior
level person looking over my shoulder while I edit a file with vi ask
me how I did some complicated editing action with three keystrokes that
would take them fifteen or more to do.
These days, while I keep an emacs instance running on one of my
desktops, I still do a lot of editing with vi. Just don't call it the
"six" editor. :-)
-jan-
--
Jan L. Peterson
Unemployed "Computer Facilitator"
http://www.peterson.ath.cx/~jlp/resume.html
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