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Re: ae's vi attempt on boot disks stomps on real vi symlink



On Thu, 8 May 1997, Ryan Smith-Roberts wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> 
> On Thu, 8 May 1997, Craig Sanders wrote:
> 
> > > The emulation is not close enough to real vi to make it worthwhile.
> > 
> > it's not great, but it's much better than ae's native mode.
> 
> I disagree.  I found that ae's vi emulation mode was just close enough to
> vi that I spent most of my time discovering the multitude of ways in which
> it was NOT like vi.  

the reason why it's better than ae's native mode takes about 0.2 seconds:

vipw<enter>Gocas::1002:1002:<oh shit i've just typed crap into the file>

when you're used to vi, you get into the habit of taking advantage of
the type-ahead buffer while the editor is loading.

This is why I hate it that the editor defaults to ae. ae is NOT vi.
vi means 'edit the passwd file with vi'. it doesn't mean 'edit the
passwd file with ae unless i set a couple of env varibales first'. 

it's nfuriating for it not to behave as expected.

at least ae's vi mode does dd properly. maybe i'm just slack or
something but i still haven't figured out how to delete a line in ae
without backspacing over the whole thing.

i'd rather use 'cat >filename' than ae any day.

> ae's native mode is a completely different editor and carries no
> baggage.

yes, it's a completely different editor. it just happens to be a very
ugly one, as bad as pico or possibly worse (at least pico can delete a
whole line with a single keystroke).

what "baggage" is there in ae's vi mode which isn't in it's native mode?

craig

--
craig sanders
networking consultant                  Available for casual or contract
temporary autonomous zone              system administration tasks.


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