Humor: Cargo Cult Programming

[Jerry Feldman]

I think the choice of emacs or vi (or vim) is much of a mater of personal 
preference. I come from a shop originally that was entirely emaics 
oriented. You edited, emailed, compiled, tested and debugged with emacs. 
Before the widspread use of windowing systems, emacs provided the multi-
windows support. Emacs is, was and always will be a pig. On the old 
workstations we would run emacs at logon, and keep it up. At Digital, I 
used emacs rather than EDT or LSE. Emacs has been a languiage sensitive 
editor for as long as I have used it. 
But, those of us who are emacs bigots should remember that vi (and vim) are 
also very powerful and capable editors, but are lighter weight. Some of my 
colleages are emacs bigots and others are vi bigots. It is all a matter of 
personal preference. 
On 14 Nov 2002 at 15:17, Derek Martin wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> At some point hitherto, pll at lanminds.com hath spake thusly:
> > 	- the ability to edit a document/file located on a remote 
> > 	  system over ssh
> > 	- the ability to cut, yank, past, and otherwise edit 
> > 	  "rectangles" of text ( I do this *all* the time with 
> > 	   things like host tables, 'ps' output, etc.
> > 	- the ability to create "on-the-fly" keyboard macros
> > 	- the ability to name the above mentioned macro
> > 	- the ability to save the above named macro for later use
> > 
> > I'm not saying that Vim can't do any of these things, but I know vi 
> > cannot.  I also hate modal editors for any long term editing, but 
> > that may not apply to Vim, right?
> 
> I don't know if vim has either of the first two, but it does have the
> last three.  OTOH, I could be mistaken, but I'm fairly sure that vi
> actually does have them too.
> 
> As for the first one, while it's neat and can be convenient, if you
> can ssh into the system then you can ssh in and run vi(m), with very
> little extra effort.  And I find that if I'm editing one file on a
> given system, there's a fair likelihood that I'm going to edit
> another or execute some command on the file I just edited as well, so
> logging in usually really just isn't that big a deal.
> 
> The second one, I admit, is a really cool feature.  I don't know if
> vim has it or not...
> 
> - -- 
> Derek D. Martin
> http://www.pizzashack.org/
> GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.2.0 (GNU/Linux)
> 
> iD8DBQE91AS9HEnASN++rQIRAgKEAJ4gtm3FRotEQWQVqpH5m3qyCT8D/wCeNEwr
> vjG5f6ujyVHns+TZhXyiQZ8=
> =9g+8
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9