On Fri, 23 Nov 2007, Josh Paetzel wrote:

> The reason that different editors exist of course, is that different 
> people are productive in different ways.

Another reason is that people make editors to make money or to promote 
themselves, and they promote their product in various ways.  So many 
people use things that suck just because they are there.


> I use vi/nvi/vim for all of my editing needs, and have done so for 15 
> odd years.  In all of my UNIX travels I've run in to one box where one 
> of those commands didn't start an editor....(and yes, it was a linux box 
> ;)

Do you mean that none of those commands started an editor, or do you 
really mean that only one of the three did not start an editor?  You 
should vi on every UNIX/Linux system.  Plenty of UNIX machines won't have 
vim or nvi.


> Oh, and speaking of editors.....I've always thought it would be fun to 
> have an editor wars competition....given a common set of editing tasks 
> and the environment of your choice, who can complete them first.  Maybe 
> would make an interesting joint TCBUG/TCLUG meeting of sorts....

That would be interesting if we had groups put together the tasks such 
that the editing teams did not know in advance, and both (g)vi(m) and 
emacs editing teams were very experienced expert users.

But even if you could arrange that, that would only answer one aspect: 
How efficient is the editor for the expert user?  For those of us who do 
some editing but not hours everyday, or who do certain kinds of tasks much 
more than others, then which is best?  I doubt it is possible to give a 
really broad answer and things will remain as they are for some time.

I do not recommend vi, gvim, etc. to students.  I recommend emacs instead. 
The reason is that vi was not developed for modern computers and it has an 
unusual, unintuitive way of doing things.  Emacs is easier to learn.  I 
also think it is easier to remember the keystrokes, and emacs keys are 
used in the readline library and thus in many programs (like the bash 
commandline).  It is often possible to swich to vi command-line editing, 
but then you have to switch and deal with the fact that other people have 
not switched.  That said, I have nothing against vi and would not 
encourage a vi user to switch to something else.

Mike