VI

[Geoffrey Gerrietts]

> From: Emile van Sebille [mailto:emile at fenx.com]
> 
> I always liked the description that vi has two modes:  one 
> beeps at you, and
> the other destroys your file.  ;-)

Hee!

There's a lovely section in the 'JOKES' file that goes out as part of emacs
(on my old-ish RH box, in /usr/share/emacs/20.5/etc/JOKES) that describes "a
typical novice's session with the mighty ed". I always found that
particularly amusing, because it described my early experiences with vi
quite nicely:
----BEGIN QUOTE----
golem> ed

?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?

Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous
enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with
verbosity.
-----END QUOTE-----

On the other hand, I use vim religiously now. I can't imagine editing in
anything else. I've used emacs, and it used to drive me absolutely insane
the way 9/10 of what I wanted to do required typing M-x
really-longass-function-name, and how I had to re-bind my keyboard to be
useful on every new machine I worked on. I resisted the vi religion at
first, despite the efforts of my kernel-hacker co-workers to convert me, but
once I got the basic commands under my fingers, there was no looking back.

I won't install emacs any more, if I'm building my own machine. Novices can
use pico, and I can always stand to have the extra gig of disk space for
something I'll use. :)

Thanks,
--G.

---
Geoff Gerrietts <geoff at homegain.com>
Software Engineer, HomeGain.com
510-655-0800 x4320