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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!uunet!in2.uu.net!128.230.129.106!news.maxwell.syr.edu!worldnet.att.net!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!EU.net!Germany.EU.net!Dortmund.Germany.EU.net!interface-business.de!usenet From: j@ida.interface-business.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy Subject: Re: Betting on Unix Date: 24 Feb 1997 17:15:01 GMT Organization: interface business GmbH, Dresden Lines: 67 Message-ID: <5esial$eit@innocence.interface-business.de> References: <5d3sr2$44n@nntp1.best.com> <5dbapu$t1f$1@nntp2.ba.best.com> <x7n2ti4s7i.fsf@dumbcat.codewright.com> <5dc7qq$hed@phoenix.sysbe.sysgo.de> <5ddcvf$4dh@sun20.ccd.bnl.gov> <330a1d23.2419719@172.15.0.208> <5ef5c8$rgs@arktur.rz.uni-ulm.de> <330B2333.38B6@to.me.please> <5ehglc$lef@innocence.interface-business.de> <330EF0FF.55CE@to.me.please> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: ida.interface-business.de X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-31809-14 X-Fax: +49-351-3361187 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:160828 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2599 comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy:54449 comp.os.os2.advocacy:269606 "Terje A. Bergesen" <no.email@to.me.please> wrote: > > > Or even vi, the most simple, yet incredible powerful editor there is. > > You are probably right with some of your statements, but you err with > > one: vi is everything else than ``most simple''. > Ease of use doesn't nessesarily mean "easy to learn". But you've been the one telling it were ``most simple''. You might attribute vi to whatever you want, but ``most simple'' is one of the attributes it _doesn't_ deserve. > I can do much more with vi than with most other editors, much > faster, and it didn't take me 10 years to learn, but it might have > taken me 2 years. Well, that's a misconception vi users rather often get acquainted to (because they had to experience this learning curve, and now believe that's the only possible way in the world -- since they can only compare against far more incapable tools). Of course, there are other editors as well that have at least the power of vi, arguably even more power. Yet, they don't take you 2 years of hard learning until you can use them reasonably, even if you're probably not going to ever learn everything of them (but do you need this?). I think i don't need to mention Emacs here... Just as an example. Unlike vi, it allows you for a much smoother learning curve (even though it's idiosyncrasic enough), and it makes it much harder to shoot in your foot. In vi, a forgotten CAPS lock key might turn out to be a big surprise, with incredible and irreparable damage that can be done in very short time. Sure, the typical vi user habit of constantly hitting the ESC key while being idle on the keyboard might prevent the worst :), but don't you think that's an abomination rather than something very valuable? As i wrote previously, you don't need to tell me about vi, i'm also using it, but it's far away from being my most preferrable editor. Even though i'm a fair vi hater, i used to know much more from it than my former colleagues who've actually been using it exclusively. Yet, even though i'm using it, i don't like it. (And for the record, all those folks who later asked me to tell them how to get going with Emacs came back two or four weeks later, telling me that they're now wondering how they got along without it all the time. :) But i don't wanna start a pointless editor flame war here, Emacs has its failures as well, and there are some (but actually only very few) things that can be done faster in vi.) Peter H. Salus's ``A Quarter Century of UNIX'' also mentions the vi history. It explains that by the time vi has been created, it was already very clear among those people who've investigated software user interfaces that a ``modal editor'' (command mode, insert mode, append mode, open mode) is indeed a very bad idea wrt. the user interaction. vi not only is a modal editor, but even worse: its commands are case-dependant, with using the command with the wrong case often causing it to do the opposite to the originally intended command. Tell me what you want, but ``easy to use'' or ``most simple'' evaluates to FALSE when `vi' is the question. (That doesn't mean it's useless, get me right on this.) -- J"org Wunsch Unix support engineer joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de http://www.interface-business.de/~j