[Gllug] ed vs emacs/vi, was: ed vs emacs, was: OpenMoko Neo Freerunner

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Sat, 16 May 2009, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:

> damion.yates at gmail.com wrote:
> > On Fri, 15 May 2009, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
> >
> > You want 13 lines you type 13k, not press <Up> 13 times, if you want
> > the line at the start of a paragraph you press {.
>   
> Likewise. What I meant was "how do I know what those numbers are in
> the first place without counting?", 13k027l65y7 is indeed much faster
> to type IF you know those numbers, if you don't then hitting up as
> many times as it takes or simply clicking would be faster than
> figuring them out.

Sorry you example wasn't clear then.  Sure if you don't know how far you
use ?string you're looking at^M  Like when I trimmed this email I used
/Y^Mv04lx to wipe to the start of the line and have it start with the
You, I was quite sure there were no other Ys in use, it was a risk, but
n over and over contines the search, or I could have typed more of the
string I wanted.  I dd'ed the first few lines.  (the v made that vim
only, I'm obviously getting lazy).

> > > Indeed I get the impression that most people here use the GUI
> > > versions
> >
> > I do not, there is nothing gained from a few menus and icons, all of
> > <snip> 
>   
> I stand corrected then.
 
I should probably add that most of the time I'm not at work I only use
my mobile phone (e90, soon to be n97), so I can't mouse around.
 
> > I would be very worried by somebody prefering to find ways to use a
> > gui (start X, use port forwardng, copy file locally or export a
> > filesytem like sshfs).
>
> Well it's not the 80s anymore and I'd far rather use a gui if one were
> available.

Most GUI editors even in the 90s were never up to emacs/vi.  I think as
you've never become a geeky power user of one of the truely powerful
editors you're still convinced the mouse to a particular point, and ease
of use are wining factors.  I too once had to use DOS (netware) at Uni
(outside of the compsci department) and thought notepad was better tham
edit.exe.  I was wrong.

> I mean, it's perfectly possible to manage all the files on your system
> from the command line but, call me a heretic, I'd rather use Nautilus
> or Thunar if it's at all practical.

If you want to select the first few files in a directory to move to
another place, that becomes a slight pain with something like
\ls -<some sort like by name or size> |head -10 |xargs ...

This is more trivial in a gui, so is randomly picking files, a situation
where I'd have to double click in my xterm on an ls to build a cmd line.

However in 90% of my file management time, I'm doing things like rm *.ts
(say after some ffmpeg transcoding to .mp4 on a bunch of files).  Or I'm
guessing my way down a path with tab completion.

Basically thinks like rm *something are almost impossible in a gui as
the sorts aren't backwards.  I'm quite suprised you're now trying to
claim gui file managers are better :)

> Like most n00bs the extent of my 'system administration' ambitions are
> the simple day to day maintenance of one or two local machines, maybe
> the administration of a VPS web/mail server and maybe the provision of
> remote access to my main desktop machine from my laptop. I don't think
> any of that really requires the power of Emacs of Vim.

Yeah, I was saying "very worried", meaning somebody working on something
important ;)
 
> > At uni over a decade ago, I wrote vi macros to make vim act almost
> > exactly like pico, right down to the annoying realestate take with
> > help keys at the bottom.  An alias called pico which envoked vim
> > with the right macro file and started it in insert mode made it an
> > almost transparent drop in replacement.  This can probably be found
> > on a comp.editors archive.
> 
> Cool, so did you write that for your own use because you liked pico or
> because so many other people were struggling with vi?

For my colleages of course!  Actually it was vim specific and I wrote it
when Bram introduced :set bs=2 which ppl can look up themselves.  I
hated it at first being an old-school vi purest, but I've started to
accept it.

Damion
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