Emacs vs vi
Today at work, the old vi vs Emacs fight broke out. Few new hires joined and bunch of us were trying to help them around with basics of BSD. As soon as I asked him to use vi for editing, another person jumped at me and said I was corrupting the new hires.
years and decades pass by and the battle never seems to end. I am primarily a vi user. I started out my unix on SCO ( yeah i know ironic ) and the editor I started out with back then was vi. It took me many weeks to get used to it ( that too over telnet from a windows machine), but when I finally did get the hang of it I never used anything else.
I know people who swear by emacs, but I dont see the big deal. If they like it, then use it (the editor which is almost an OS :D). Dont go around poking at people who use vi. I am glad after all these years, the linux distro fights are over , and now every person users his personally preferred distro or even a diff OS like FreeBSD.
when will people learn
to each his own
MS Word! 😉
Seriously though, I didn’t know distro wars were over – it just seems like all the old folk got tired of it. With good reason, of course.
Distro wars came back to life after emacs was officially upgraded in nomenclature from “editor” to “OS” to “distribution”.
So these days it is Debian v/s Redhat v/s Emacs.
Only clueless people compare emacs with editors these days 😉
[gdr]
Don’t you mean GNU/Debian vs. GNU/Redhat vs. GNU/Emacs ?
Oh wait! It isn’t GNU/Emacs – it is GNU Emacs. Unless we’re talking abt XEmacs, or the various other e-macs and i-macs out there.
[/gdr]
(yeah, [gdr] is a lot easier to type compared to <g,d&r> – so sue me :p)
As I like to put it. Vi is your favourtie frying pan.Highest comfort level with it.
joe?
joe’s own editor? am I the only fella who uses it
hehe looks like it.
I’ve used joe, pico , and something else which sounded like that… maybe these are good options for newbies.. works more like old wordstar
oh wait
If rms comes to know that there are enough emacs users in yahoo, soon he will want it to be called GNU/Yahoo!
jed?
Okay, I swear by Emacs. I love it but I use it only for three things :
* Coding
* Writing papers with LaTeX
* Plain text documents
That being said, I use vi for quick editing of documents, especially configuration files 🙂
I started using Vi on SCO (my first encounter with UNIX). I remember how I hated it at first–but then I hadn’t used any other editors either (not even Notepad or Pico). Vi definitely nees a tutorial, and a little getting used to. I learnt to use it properly with the help of Bill Joy’s classic.
Vim rocks!
I never understood why Emacs even exists 🙂 Stallman says he couldn’t use Vi, so he wrote Emacs.