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Originally posted by Calum:
haw haw haw haw haw!!!!
how funny! political persuasion as revealed by choice of text editor! 
Good, you took it for the joke that it was. I was going out on a limb with that one.
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i used to prefer pico becuase it's the only non-gui text editor i have found that does not require any training to use. I then did the tutorial in emacs, which took me a few days, and now i see that it is full of features so that i will be forever finding out new things for it. i like emacs a lot now. however, i have not used vi or vim yet. so i cannot comment really.
That's a normal transgression. I started with vi in UNIX because it was the only real editor included with the OS. Being new to UNIX I found the editor very cryptic and difficult to use so I searched around and downloaded an easier (but less powerful) editor called "joe". "joe" is much like "pico" in many ways, but pico comes with "pine" so it was probably the choice.
Now since "vi" was included with all of the UNIX machines I did need to learn more about it as it was a pain to have to install a 3rd party editor just to administer my systems. To my surprise after going through some tutorials I found "vi" to be *extremely* powerful and what made it seem cryptic at first actually became clear, intuitive, efficient, and just plain made total sense (much like my experience with UNIX in general).
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Any good suggestions on why i should switch to vim? and if so, any good links to a vim tutorial or two?
Well, if you are happy with emacs and it is serving it's purpose then I would suggest pressing on. Reasons for switching probably wouldn't be significant for you. On the other hand you would be one of few if you learned both in depth. I can say that if you learn vi/vim you can walk up to *any* *NIX based system and have a familiar editor at your fingertips. You may or may not have emacs available depending on whether the admin installed it. The default editor on all UNIX/Linux systems that I have ever touched default to "vi" for things like editing the crontab, mail, etc. And the last reason is you will end up with your name in the same column as mine on the preferred editor list.
As far as vim tutorials there are many. The vim website probably has a list of links. O'Reilly even has books on the subject, and I used to carry around their pocket reference. But there was one unique tutorial that I ran accross that I thought was a good and fun primer. It certaintly doesn't come close to scratching the surface of the power within vi/vim but it's fun/funny:
http://metacosm.dhs.org/tutorial.htmlAnd a screenshot of a sample session and it's syntax highlighting capability:
http://metacosm.dhs.org/screenshots/vim.png quote:
VoidMain: very sorry to hear of your travails! this is the first i heard of it! let me offer my condolences on becoming such an invalid! hope you get weller sooner!
Thanks man! I would like nothing more than to be trying to master that trick that kicked my ass, but it'll be a few months before I'm ready for that...
[ September 04, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
