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Re: Where do you RTFM ?



On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 02:49:40PM -0600, Colin Watson wrote:
| On Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 03:25:09PM -0500, David Teague wrote:
| > I LIKE emacs. We were using vi as our only text editor with System V
| > machines in the late 80s. I found and installed Emacs, within one
| > week everyone on my faculty was using emacs.
| 
| Given a 1980s-era vi, I'd probably have gone for emacs too. Unbound
| cursor keys, single-level undo, counter-intuitive screen updates with
| 'c', no backspace across line endings or even the point where you
| started the current round of insertion, etc.
| 
| Fortunately vi implementations like vim have moved on considerably since
| then. While they share vi's basic interface, its heritage of user
| interface bugs is barely recognizable. I find traditional vi quite a
| mental jolt now.

I agree with this.  My first encounter with 'vi' was /bin/vi on
Solaris systems.  According to :version it is real vi, not a clone.
It is fine for tweaking your shell config, but not for writing code.
I tended to use nedit because it wasn't _too_ slow over a dialup and
many times better than effielbench (yeah, I learned eiffel my first
year at school, fall of '98).

Later I taught myself emacs (with help from Harley Hahn's book).
However the following quarter I had to use win95 systems on which we
were not "allowed" to install software.  vim fit on a floppy so I used
it (better that DOS "edit").  I learned how to configure vim to be
very comfortable, and I found the vi-style commands easier to
remember.

Now my IDE consists of vim in combination with a Unix environment
(cygwin if it must be).

-D

-- 

What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his
soul?  Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?
        Mark 8:36-37



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