[Gllug] vi vs emacs (repeat)

[David Damerell]

On Monday, 7 Mar 2005, Nix wrote:
>The editor is strongly modal: you're typing text or doing other things,
>never both at once, and you need to explicitly switch (ESC goes one way,
>`i' and `a' and a myriad of other keystrokes go the other way).

I dispute that vi is modal - any more than Emacs is modal because you
are in "minibuffer command mode" whenever you type M-x. vi has insert
commands and they take potentially lengthy arguments, that's
all. Thinking of "insert mode" discourages useful tricks which use
insert commands as part of more complex structures.

>Comparatively recently, the `vim' reimplementation has popped up, which
>supports many more features inside the editor, syntax highlighting,
>autoindentation, a sort of on-line help and so on.

I think this is completely pointless, me. I use both; but if I want to
edit something big enough to want syntax highlighting, Emacs is the
tool for the job. I generally install a plain "nvi" on any machine
that doesn't have it already - that eliminates the gratuitous bugs in
UNIX vendor vis, but on Dead Rat and the like doesn't leave me staring
at vim going "Now what did it do?"

A proper vi user uses :wq not ZZ. :-)

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?
Today is Monday, March.
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug