emacs & vi (vim) approaches)

[Tom Buskey]

Michael O'Donnell said:
>
>
>As I've said before, I suspect that emacs- and
>perl-users are actually the higher life forms;
>it's just that I don't know how to use them and so
>keep falling back on vi and the other tools that I
>already know...

Like the awkqustion going on.  If I'm doing lots of coding, I'm usually 
running xemacs because I like the ksh-mode and perl-mode.  I also like 
dired and its interaction with CVS/RCS.

However, most of the time when I login to a remote machine, I run vi.  
Heck, for the last year on my home machines I've almost exclusively run 
vi.  My vi skills are not as good as my emacs skills.  The discussion 
helps.

>
 <stuff deleted> 
>If I had to name some of my favorite vi characteristics
>I'd have to say its regular expression handling and
>particularly its feed-specified-region-as-stdin-to-
>arbitrary-program-and-replace-that-region-with-the-
>resultant-stdout trick.  The latter means that you

Emacs can do that too of course.

>can do anything with any text in any vi buffer that
>you could do with any arbitrary program that processes
>its stdin and spews something useful via its stdout.
>Therefore, the answer to most of pll's queries is
>"yes" (though YMMV) because you can sort, columnize,
>reformat, etc, with programs like sort, cut, ls,
>tbl, indent, fmt, etc.  And if there isn't already
>a program that does what you want, you can write one.
>

I saw an emacs lisp file that did similar things.  The guy that wrote it
understood emacs lisp pretty well and didn't know the standard unix
tools that well so he has emacs run it in batch mode!  You think perl
takes up more memory then awk????

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Tom Buskey