[Wolves] Editors

Katherine Goodwin kat at codepoets.co.uk
Sun May 15 11:14:41 BST 2005


Andrew Roberts wrote :
> On Fri, 2005-05-13 at 14:53, Stuart Langridge wrote:
> > That's because there isn't any advantage :)
> 
> Perhaps not if you only edit occasionally.
While I use vim almost exclusively, I will admit that its not the easiest thing to use,
however, the advantage for me was always the flexibility of a powerful editor that I could
run from the command line.

I learnt it because I wanted to work from our machine at home when I was developing as a
student - the machines we had at uni were completely crap and our disk space allocation
was a bit stingy when you were trying to check out a ton of code and tests and docs.
I wanted to be able to work in the same way whereever I was, and vim allowed me to do
that, and to carry out all the tasks I wanted to do.  Whenever one of our fellow
developers would say something like "I bet you can't do this in vim <insert geek joke
here" and demonstrate a feature on their (normally pirated) editor, David would get out
his big vim book and maybe 9 out of ten times, would be able to show them that we could.

That's probably the worst thing though - you do have to 'learn' it

Currently I'm doing my python development in eric, because we're going to use it for the
course coming up, and apart from the :wq bits that keep appearing in my code, its fine.
However, I'm still stuck on vim, and am unlikely to ever become unstuck on it when I want
to be able to work on a remote machine from anywhere.

It just fits with my whole way of working - I use the command line / config files over gui
tools almost all the time, because that's the way I've always done it.  It may not be
right, it may not be clever, but its the way I work!

just my 2ps worth :-)

Kat



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