On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 07:36 -0500, Timothy Wood wrote: > Believe it or not, I have decided that I would be interested in > learning one of the two. Navigating around from place to place when > writing does take forever with a GUI. However, I haven't had the time > to start learning, and I'm not sure whether to learn Vim or Emacs. At > one point, though, I think I had decided on Vim, and had done some > googleing for a tutorial, but I wouldn't be able to give you a good > reason why Vim over Emacs because I know almost nothing of either.
The biggest advantage to learning Vi is it's the only editor guaranteed to always be installed on every *nix box. You should at least know the basics. As long as you're learning the basics, you might as well learn what makes Vim so magical that people make such a big deal about it. Once upon a time, the stereotypical break down was: Vi for sysadmins, Emacs for developers. These days, though, many developers have moved on to IDEs. Because it is more programmable, Emacs "understands" the contents of a file so that you can edit at the semantic level. Vim, on the other handle is more like the love child of a chainsaw and a swiss army knife. It may not "understand" the file contents, but it gives an incredible array of tools for editing generic text quickly. If you spend most of your time editing files with different syntax, Vim is the way to go. If you spend most of your time editing files with the same syntax, emacs might be better (but I still prefer Vim). -- "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it." - Chris Maden -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
