Re: An 'ae' testimony

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

Paul Seelig <pseelig@mail.Uni-Mainz.de> writes:

> Maybe "vi" on the boot disks should simply say "vi didn't fit on the
> bootdisk, so please use the self explaining 'ae' which will be started
> right now" and forget about the bothersome vi emulation nuisance.

This has been suggested before, and I've no idea why it wasn't adopted.

Is there anyone out there that actually likes using ae in pretend-vi mode ?

I'd personally prefer something along the lines of:

----</bin/vi-placeholder>---
#!/bin/sh
cat <<'!EOF!'
                        -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
  Sorry, but VI doesn't fit on the first floppy of the Debian install.

      Don't PANIC!

  We did have room for an editor called AE.  AE tells you all about
  it's keystrokes at the top of the screen, and if you wish it can run
  in a fairly VI like mode.

  Of course, as soon as you've installed just a little more of Debian,
  you'll be able to choose from several real VI implementations.
 
  I'll now run AE for you, how would you prefer AE to run:
!EOF!
echo -n "       (A)E mode, (V)i mode, or just (Q)uit [A/v/q] "
read input
case $input in
  [vV]*)  exec /bin/ae.vi.sh "$@" ;;
  [qQ]*)  exit 0 ;;
esac
exec /bin/ae "$@"
----

But that's just because I see AE come up, and start using AE
keystrokes, even though it's in VI mode.  Doh!

Cheers, Phil.