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Offline Jope

Re: linex text editor?
« Reply #14 from previous page: August 27, 2003, 12:49:53 PM »
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Anyone who actually likes [vi], quite frankly needs their head examined.


Now now, don't be starting an editor war!

Vi does everything I need from a text editor.. (and I feel rather sane)
 

Offline asian1

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Re: linex text editor?
« Reply #15 on: August 27, 2003, 01:15:19 PM »
Try JSTAR, some sort of WordStar / Turbo pascal
compatible editor. Another editor:
SED (Stream editor).
Try "man sed"
 

Offline FluffyMcDeath

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Re: linex text editor?
« Reply #16 on: August 27, 2003, 08:57:11 PM »
Forget vi .
You want Vim!!!

That's Vi IMproved.

It's hugely capable. Yes, it takes a bit of getting used to, but so does everything.

It started life on the Amiga back in 1988. Bram Moolenar got an Amiga 2000, but wasn't a big fan of Ed, wanted something more like vi on UNIX. He found a proggie that was a bit like vi, but wasn't happy with it. The source was available so he started hacking away. Many moons later and with much input from users and other developers it is a very powerful editor, and is available on a large number of platforms (including UNIX, often being used instead of vi!!).

It's charity ware, but fully working. Try it.
Actually, you may already have it. I think vim in in several standard distros now.
 

Offline Floid

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Re: linex text editor?
« Reply #17 on: August 27, 2003, 10:28:56 PM »
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FluffyMcDeath wrote:
Forget vi .
You want Vim!!!

That's Vi IMproved.

It's hugely capable. Yes, it takes a bit of getting used to, but so does everything.

It started life on the Amiga back in 1988.
Props there - I forgot all about the heritage.  'Vim' is indeed the best 'vi' for serious work.  Do forgive us BSD fans for snickering at distros that use it by default, though -

-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1301332 Jul  8 03:08 vim
-r-xr-xr-x  6 root  wheel  311156 Jun  5 00:24 nvi

...I think they're compensating for something. ;)  (Seriously for those trying to learn from this, it's a degree-of-complexity 'debate.'  Vim is cool, but the question is how far you trust it to work and not have possibly relied on an unnecessary dependency when your system's just blown apart.  The answer, of course, is that you can trust it quite far, because any kinks have long-since been ironed out, but shipping something 'simple' by default lets you worry about other things, like why you had to be in single-user with partitions unmountable.  The 5.x-branch of FreeBSD is in the process of trashing some of its recovery niceties in tradeoff for some new features, anyway... and if you run out of a single / partition with no separate /usr, you'll never get in a situation to notice the differences anyway; either your system will be hosed or it won't. ;-))

Asian1 said,
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Another editor:  SED (Stream editor).
Try "man sed"
Man, sometimes I can't tell if you're kidding. ;-)  sed is a great tool - and part of the 'grep, awk, sed' trinity of 'things with silly names that hold UNIX together,' but it'd take a brave, slightly insane man to use it for daily editing.  It's quite handy for things like find/replace on a file ('stream') from the command line, once you've learned all about regular expressions...