Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX

Screem

<< < (6/6)

flap:
No idea. It's just a popular quote.

voidmain:

quote:Originally posted by Calum:
haw haw haw haw haw!!!!
how funny! political persuasion as revealed by choice of text editor!     :D         :D         :D    

--- End quote ---


Good, you took it for the joke that it was. I was going out on a limb with that one.      

   
quote:
i used to prefer pico becuase it's the only non-gui text editor i have found that does not require any training to use. I then did the tutorial in emacs, which took me a few days, and now i see that it is full of features so that i will be forever finding out new things for it. i like emacs a lot now. however, i have not used vi or vim yet. so i cannot comment really.
--- End quote ---


That's a normal transgression. I started with vi in UNIX because it was the only real editor included with the OS. Being new to UNIX I found the editor very cryptic and difficult to use so I searched around and downloaded an easier (but less powerful) editor called "joe". "joe" is much like "pico" in many ways, but pico comes with "pine" so it was probably the choice.

Now since "vi" was included with all of the UNIX machines I did need to learn more about it as it was a pain to have to install a 3rd party editor just to administer my systems. To my surprise after going through some tutorials I found "vi" to be *extremely* powerful and what made it seem cryptic at first actually became clear, intuitive, efficient, and just plain made total sense (much like my experience with UNIX in general).

   
quote:Any good suggestions on why i should switch to vim? and if so, any good links to a vim tutorial or two?
--- End quote ---


Well, if you are happy with emacs and it is serving it's purpose then I would suggest pressing on. Reasons for switching probably wouldn't be significant for you. On the other hand you would be one of few if you learned both in depth. I can say that if you learn vi/vim you can walk up to *any* *NIX based system and have a familiar editor at your fingertips. You may or may not have emacs available depending on whether the admin installed it. The default editor on all UNIX/Linux systems that I have ever touched default to "vi" for things like editing the crontab, mail, etc. And the last reason is you will end up with your name in the same column as mine on the preferred editor list.      

As far as vim tutorials there are many. The vim website probably has a list of links. O'Reilly even has books on the subject, and I used to carry around their pocket reference. But there was one unique tutorial that I ran accross that I thought was a good and fun primer. It certaintly doesn't come close to scratching the surface of the power within vi/vim but it's fun/funny:

http://metacosm.dhs.org/tutorial.html

And a screenshot of a sample session and it's syntax highlighting capability:

http://metacosm.dhs.org/screenshots/vim.png

 
quote:
VoidMain: very sorry to hear of your travails! this is the first i heard of it! let me offer my condolences on becoming such an invalid! hope you get weller sooner!     :D    
--- End quote ---


Thanks man! I would like nothing more than to be trying to master that trick that kicked my ass, but it'll be a few months before I'm ready for that...

[ September 04, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

Calum:
thanks for all the helpful comments!

yes i would like to learn both, as you say, vi is default (or only) editor on Unix (and BSD as well?) so it makes sense. also:  
quote:That's a normal transgression. I started with vi in UNIX because it was the only real editor included with the OS. Being new to UNIX I found the editor very cryptic and difficult to use so I searched around and downloaded an easier (but less powerful) editor called "joe". "joe" is much like "pico" in many ways, but pico comes with "pine" so it was probably the choice.

Now since "vi" was included with all of the UNIX machines I did need to learn more about it as it was a pain to have to install a 3rd party editor just to administer my systems. To my surprise after going through some tutorials I found "vi" to be *extremely* powerful and what made it seem cryptic at first actually became clear, intuitive, efficient, and just plain made total sense (much like my experience with UNIX in general).
--- End quote ---
yes indeedy! now my reasons for digging in with emacs first was more political than that. you see while vi has hostorically been included with all unices, emacs comes from the free software foundation, of which i am a staunch supporter. Vi is proprietary, Emacs is free software, simple. Of course, i think Vi and Vim are completely free now too (or are they free clones of vi and vim?) but that was my reasoning.

Basically a GNU system will likely have emacs on it, so no problem, but many unices are not GNU systems of course, so it makes sense to learn both. plus, if i don't learn both, how will i know which i prefer?  :D

voidmain:
vim actually stands for "Vi IMproved". It has all of the basic functionality as "vi" plus a LOT more. So if you know vi you can use vim just the same. It's good to know the differences between vim and vi and I use vi keys even though vim extends the keys (e.g. I use the h,j,k,l keys for cursor movement even though vim also allows you to use arrow keys).

And vim is open source charity ware "GPL Compatible". vi is the defacto UNIX standard even though it is propietary. And vim (like emacs) is included with all Linux distros that I am aware of. And I personally haven't installed emacs when I install Linux for quite some time. It just takes up a lot of space on my system for no reason since I don't use it. And yes, I made the transition to emacs before moving on to vim. But that has been a good 6 or 8 years ago now. The vim web site really is a very professional site and has a lot of quality information:

http://www.vim.org/

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page