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

[Nix]

On 18 May 2009, general verbalised:
> Nix wrote:
>> so you could flip from GUI stuff to shell
>> oneliners when necessary, but as time went by I found myself using shell
>> oneliners for *everything* and the GUI not at all.
> Yeah, you see I'm not there. I do a fair bit of web design and it's
> lovely being able to view a folder of pictures by thumbnail and view and
> sort lots of files quickly by type and date etc.

Ah. For *that* application graphical things of course have no equal:
viewing graphics is their killer app :) but I hardly ever do that.

>> I've ever seen is very bad at doing recursive operations or operations
>> on sets of files selected by any means other than pointing at them
> I agree, but I very rarely need to do that. In the majority cases I
> think a graphical file manager is a nicer way to work - letting you
> choose between list, tree and icon view as is appropriate for you data,
> differentiating file types with different icons, letting you attach your
> choice of image to folders - I think these things help you navigate and
> keep track of what is where.

Not for me.

>                               If you are endowed with an excellent memory
> maybe these things aren't so important but I'm not, and so I find the
> graphical approach pretty useful.

Sure. A lot of people have strong visual abilities, and for them maybe
this helps.

>> Languages are more powerful than pointing at things. Humans are
>> linguistic creatures. Thus the command-line is preferable.
>>
> I disagree. Humans are visual creatures first and will find visual ways
> of working easier than purely linguistic ones.

This very much varies by individual. Hell, it varies in my own family:
my sister is strongly visual, I am very strongly linguistic to such a
degree that I often can't remember what I look like. I suspect that
perhaps any generalities here are wrong.

>                                                More powerful rarely, if
> ever, sits nicely with easy to use and so power isn't always preferable.

I note that you're communicating here by writing, not in mime. If you
have anything sophisticated to communicate (including to a machine),
language is invaluable. I can't understand this mania for pointing and
grunting^Wclicking at all.

>                                        Likewise, if I need to write a
> program I'd prefer to write it in Python to C

But you'd use a *language*. You wouldn't try to describe it visually,
because that's not precise enough for anything useful --- and if it was,
you've just used a visual language (there have been a few, they never
took off).
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