Date: Sun, 30 May 1999 09:38:22 -0500 From: Carroll Kong <damascus@eden.rutgers.edu> To: Dustin Lang <dustinl@interchange.ubc.ca>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Ramblings from a Newbie... Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19990530093822.00c6e0b0@email.eden.rutgers.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95q.990529215543.18774C-100000@netinfo3.ubc.ca>
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At 10:25 PM 5/29/99 -0700, Dustin Lang wrote: >I have just one question, but it's not specific to FreeBSD or even BSD. >Why on earth do people use vi? I'm not trying to start a flame war or >anything, but it's just so unfriendly. Doing the install was simple >and very friendly up until I did a 'chsh' and got vi! My editor of choice >is pico, the editor that looks like pine and has instructions on the >bottom. Sure, it's simple and doesn't have all the advanced features you >might want in an editor, but for doing a 'chsh', it's sufficient! Of >course, that's just me... >-- Dustin Lang, dustinl@interchange.ubc.ca -- In general, vi is 'universal'. There is hardly a unix system today that does not have vi as an editor. It is generally very small and actually has a lot of potential and power packed inside. vi has powerful substitution strings commands that perl has based most of it's powerful string manipulation powers on. In short, it is small, and extremely powerful. The great downside is ... for an editor, it actually has a learning curve. I think I tried using pico once and it added a few newlines at some parts... did some bad things to a configuration file that should not have been there. (could be me.) I have never statically linked pico, so I have no idea how big it would get. You can change the default editor through the environment settings. An 'easier' editor to use is 'ee'. -Carroll Kong To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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