On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Stuart Jansen <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 10:34 -0600, Bryan Murdock wrote:
>> If you are working on unixes boxes so old they can't run emacs, it's
>> time to look for a new job.
>
> Nobody said anything about the systems being too old. Just that many
> sysadmins don't bother installing emacs unless they know there'll be
> whiny emacs users on the system.
>
> (To say nothing of embedded systems like phones and wireless access
> points. I can SSH into my phone and have fun with vi, but no emacs.)

Sorry, the only embedded systems I've hacked on extensively ran an
RTOS and you had to write your own shells and applications for them.
No emacs or vi :-(  I got farthest on those by writing pexpect scripts
to interact with the rudimentary shell that we had, but that's getting
a bit off topic.

> If all you've ever learned about Vim is how to quit, you're hardly in a
> position to share a useful opinion.

You've called me out.  Here is where I admit that some of my best
emacs tricks are things I saw power-vim users do, and then went and
researched how to do the same on emacs.  vi kind of forces users to
become power users, whereas emacs is easy to use for basic stuff from
the get-go, and many users never even realize the full potential of
emacs.

I do know the basics of vi(m) and can get around if in it if I really
have to.  My impression is that vi is more RISC with lots of single
button commands strung together to get things done (which fortunately
you can repeat with .), and emacs is more CISC, with longer commands
and/or macros that (may or may not have keyboard shortcuts) that do
more stuff in one fell swoop.

Bryan
--------------------
BYU Unix Users Group 
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