vi or emacs????

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What are your preferences?
I have learnt emacs recently and it seems absolutely excellent.

― Willdabeast, Tuesday, 10 February 2004 19:18 (twenty-two years ago)

I love my eMac. Lots of space and storage. Doesn't feel like a toy like an iMac, but doesn't cost three grand either.

― Pleasant Plains (Pleasant Plains), Tuesday, 10 February 2004 19:20 (twenty-two years ago)

I like emacs personally. Hopefully this won't invoke the ire of Jon Williams again.

― Dale the Titled (cprek), Tuesday, 10 February 2004 19:23 (twenty-two years ago)

Both have their place.

― martin m. (mushrush), Tuesday, 10 February 2004 19:24 (twenty-two years ago)

can I be obtuse and say pico/nano (Vi for preference out of the two options((also wil, have been lookin into sparcs)))

― Ed (dali), Tuesday, 10 February 2004 19:28 (twenty-two years ago)

I always preferred emacs before discovering pico.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 10 February 2004 19:32 (twenty-two years ago)

hmm, yes Vi is obviously the only one supported universally.
pico / nano lack the versatility of vi tho.

Interested to hear about your future sparc adventures.
I would love to run one....
WIl

― Willdabeast, Tuesday, 10 February 2004 19:32 (twenty-two years ago)

Yay emacs and its native LISP interpreter!

― Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Tuesday, 10 February 2004 20:16 (twenty-two years ago)

Just plain yay LISP!

― martin m. (mushrush), Tuesday, 10 February 2004 20:16 (twenty-two years ago)

I knew exactly what this thread title meant, which is bad enough.

― mei (mei), Tuesday, 10 February 2004 20:23 (twenty-two years ago)

There was a time when fights broke out about this topic. As such, when you have your terminal setup correctly, vi is my weapon of choice.

That said, in old age Im always forgetting my sed commands.

― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 11 February 2004 00:40 (twenty-two years ago)

I knew exactly what this thread title meant, which is bad enough.

Haha! Give in. I still remember teaching a friend of mine to use emacs commands back in 1993.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 11 February 2004 02:50 (twenty-two years ago)

I like vi. It's elegant.

― adam (adam), Wednesday, 11 February 2004 03:10 (twenty-two years ago)

Emacs, modality sucks. But really though, neither, just buy a Mac and use BBEdit.

― anode (anode), Wednesday, 11 February 2004 03:15 (twenty-two years ago)

Or buy Windows and use UltraEdit.

― Andrew (enneff), Wednesday, 11 February 2004 03:36 (twenty-two years ago)

vi is pretty dreadful, the 256 characters per line limit trips me up all the time. vim, on the other hand, is invaluable and i use it daily. 'g?' is probably my favourite command, have never used it for anything real but i like the thought that one day i'll have to rot13 something in a hurry and being able to do it in 2 keystrokes.

i did try emacs but my memory of the built-in tutorial is that it dumps you into a buffer without telling you how to get out of it. i got that far and had to ask someone how to get out of it and, well, never went back. i did have a leaf through a friend's 'emacs command reference guide' but all but one of the commands for the various things were longer than the vim versions. having to use both ctrl and alt keys for some things is awkward, especially on windows keyboards where the windows key sits between them. i also hear stories of RMS himself having such bad rsi that he uses volunteers to type for him.

i thought we had the religion argument last week 8)

andy

― koogs (koogs), Wednesday, 11 February 2004 20:27 (twenty-two years ago)

sed

― Colin Saunders (csaunders), Wednesday, 11 February 2004 20:57 (twenty-two years ago)

Sticking with vi for now. and im using Ultraedit as well which is brilliant...
sed is good but you can use it within vi anyway.

― Willdabeast, Wednesday, 11 February 2004 21:09 (twenty-two years ago)

wil, ring me tomorrow, I might need you to go to a business park in sheffield re: some sparc stuff.

― Ed (dali), Wednesday, 11 February 2004 23:55 (twenty-two years ago)

dos, edlin ;)

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Thursday, 12 February 2004 13:56 (twenty-two years ago)

As is my wont on these threads, can someone write a paragraph-long idiots guide? I find it strangely fascinating.

― Markelby (Mark C), Thursday, 12 February 2004 14:04 (twenty-two years ago)

we're talking text editors, imagine "notepad" but either much better or much harder to use.

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Thursday, 12 February 2004 14:06 (twenty-two years ago)

Word processing programs? Or do you so other stuff with said text?

― Markelby (Mark C), Thursday, 12 February 2004 14:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Not word processing, pure text for writing scripts, code, batch files, configs etc.

Instructions for computers to do things.

Neccersary in Unix operating systems very handy in the others .

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Thursday, 12 February 2004 14:11 (twenty-two years ago)

I guessed as much. So they have lots of strange and complicated characters? Are they used for asking computers to do things in the same way Windows users click on icons etc., or telling computers how to do things at a more fundamental level?

― Markelby (Mark C), Thursday, 12 February 2004 14:12 (twenty-two years ago)

I use jed - emacs I found utterly impenetrable (but I vaguely see how it works), and as for vi - what on EARTH is that all about? Loada nuts if you ask me.

― Sarah (starry), Thursday, 12 February 2004 14:13 (twenty-two years ago)

It depends on what processes the text, if it's a programming language you are writing like C or Pascal your text is made into a program and can be executed by the PC like any other application.

If you are writing a script it is similiar but usually you are automating functions controlled by operating system commands

You can also introduce concepts such as loops into commands

A simple script might be to check a directory and if there is a certain file there move it to another location.

so rather than clicking on the directory folder and visually identifing the the file and then copy and pasting it somewhere else. You write a script that uses the text equivalents of those commands to automate this function such a file may look like this

if exist c:\temp\logfile.txt
then
move c:\temp\logfile.txt d:\logfiles
else
end

Then when this script is activated it does those commands for you very quickly.

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Thursday, 12 February 2004 14:21 (twenty-two years ago)

note very simple example that will not work.

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Thursday, 12 February 2004 14:22 (twenty-two years ago)

Directly tellinnng a computer what to do generally uses a shell. Text editors allow you to chain a whole load of commands to gether as a script or you can even write a whole programme, webpage or the really obtuse write up their phd thesis in vi using the laTex page description language.

Text editor edits text what you do with it is your own business

― Ed (dali), Thursday, 12 February 2004 14:24 (twenty-two years ago)

Recently I R been using a text editor to edit my sources.list!

I also use it for Zelda walkthrough but generally I just load it up on Galeon because it's up and running anyway.

― Sarah (starry), Thursday, 12 February 2004 14:31 (twenty-two years ago)

LaTeX ain't it?

― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Thursday, 12 February 2004 23:14 (twenty-two years ago)

probably, it's been a step too far into geekdom for my liking, after watching a friend write a thesis that way, an exercise in pointlessness if you ask me.

― Ed (dali), Friday, 13 February 2004 08:39 (twenty-two years ago)

if you have to choose between the two, emacs is less painful than vi

― Orbit (Orbit), Friday, 13 February 2004 08:40 (twenty-two years ago)

I find the reverse to be true, but I can use neither to the fullest of their capabilities.

― Ed (dali), Friday, 13 February 2004 08:45 (twenty-two years ago)

emacs is only installed as xemacs on the remote box we use for our server so i'm starting to use vi on it but i like emacs for heavy lifting maybe just coz i don't know how to use vi modes to do paren matching and all that other handy stuff.

emacs autoindent can bite my ass though -- i either need to waste a day making it work right or live with it doing exactly what i DON'T want especially in mixed php/html files.

but i need to find how to change the frikin terminal colors coz vi colors the comments blue and it turns real dark blue when sshing in and i need to lean all close to the screen to read...

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Friday, 13 February 2004 10:31 (twenty-two years ago)

I wrote my MA dissertation in LaTeX with Emacs - it was much easier than doing it in a word processor. It does a wonderful amount of stuff automatically - numbering and renumbering everything correctly, including cross-references. The most useful bit: getting it to generate the bibliography almost entirely automatically.

― caitlin (caitlin), Friday, 13 February 2004 11:10 (twenty-two years ago)

Writing a thesis in anything else is mentalism.

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Friday, 13 February 2004 11:11 (twenty-two years ago)

I have been out-nerded. At school I used to lay out my essays in Quark Xpress, but I guess that is mac Nerddom

― Ed (dali), Friday, 13 February 2004 11:14 (twenty-two years ago)

You mean journals actually will accept articles in a format other then LaTeX these days?

― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Friday, 13 February 2004 14:02 (twenty-two years ago)

and the whole thing is a walk in the park after trying to use WordStar. I forget what the apple program was called but it barely made more sense.

― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Friday, 13 February 2004 14:04 (twenty-two years ago)

what's wrong with say openoffice and it's postscript or pdf output?

Maybe I'm just too young.

― Ed (dali), Friday, 13 February 2004 14:05 (twenty-two years ago)

sterling:
>i don't know how to use vi modes to do paren matching and all that
>other handy stuff.

:set showmatch
(':set all' shows you all the available options)

>emacs autoindent can bite my ass though

:set ai turns on autoindent in vim. :set ts=4 and :set sw=4 makes it use 4 character tabs.

>but i need to find how to change the frikin terminal colors coz vi
>colors the comments blue and it turns real dark blue

with vim it's just ':colorscheme' (then press space and tab will cycle through the choices). i use a customised colorscheme but it's based heavily on 'murphy' (which i think also uses dark blue for something but it's something less important, like #defines). if you copy your favourite to ~/.vim/colors/something.vim you can edit it there and ':colorscheme something' will pick it up (or put it in your .vimrc)

andy

― koogs (koogs), Sunday, 15 February 2004 22:02 (twenty-two years ago)

Ed, dude, LaTeX is by far the easiest thing to typeset anything vaguely mathematical in. If you were buggering around with Quark you probably wasted whole man-days just doing the equations.

― Ricardo (RickyT), Sunday, 15 February 2004 23:00 (twenty-two years ago)

Its also not really comparable to ps or pdf.

― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:43 (twenty-two years ago)

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