emacs & vi (vim) approaches)

[John Abreau]

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"Tom Buskey" said:

> My vi skills are not as good as my emacs skills.  The discussion helps.

I'm sort of in between. I've been using vi since 1983, and emacs since 
1996.
I tend to use emacs mostly for coding and scripting, as most of the stuff 
I'd do in vi is second nature at this point, whereas I still have to 
think about how to do a lot of things in emacs.

On the other hand, I despise Vim. Sure, it's got extra features over and 
above "real" vi, but after 19 years of using vi, I find the differences 
distracting and aggravating. Too much of vi's functionality that I 
expect to be there is just missing, and I frequently find myself tripping 
over its extra features. For instance, there's some sort of macro 
recording
mode that often pops up unexpectedly.

In the past I'd always end up tracking down the source to nvi and building
that to replace vim. The past couple years, however, Redhat has been 
shipping
nvi with their distribution. Nvi is actually the "real" vi; as I 
understand
it, it's basically the original BSD vi codebase with the AT&T-tainted bits 
scraped off. 


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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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