[Sussex] A beginner's guide to GNU/Linux

[linux at oneandoneis2.org]

Quoting Richie Jarvis <richie at helkit.com>:

> linux at oneandoneis2.org wrote:
>> But I suppose in these days of Gnome & KDE, it makes less   
>> difference that it used to because many people don't use the   
>> command line at all. . .

> Ah-ha! Not so sir...  If you spend all your day connecting to remote
> machines the other side of the world where your only view is an SSH
> connection, then Gnome and KDE don't really help much...

They don't help much when you're a die-hard FVWM2 fan either ;o) But  
there *are* an increasing number of people on the Linux forums who  
want (and get) ways to do things that don't involve the CLI. Tragic,  
really. . .

> Personally, I
> use vi - have done since day one on a unix box, its installed by
> default (in one guise or another) on every *nix I've ever seen - I was
> going to write that Emacs isn't, but then I realised that I don't
> actually know whether Emacs is or not!

I seem to recall being told that vi was a part of the POSIX standard,  
so should presumably be on pretty much all *nixes in one form or  
another.

I first used vi because it was the only way to set up cron jobs on the  
Unix system I was on. Other than that I avoided it like the plague and  
stuck to pico for my limited editing needs - strange things happened  
when I tried to type something in vi. . .

Came back to Linux a few years later and needed a better text editor  
(I was on Slackware) so I tried both vi & emacs out and decided vi  
suited me better. Couldn't really give a good reason as to why, I just  
liked it. Still do: Even my Windows machine at work has vim installed  
on it.

It's been a godsend while I've been learning C recently - if I liked  
it as a text editor, I've come to really appreciate it as an IDE..