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

[Nix]

On 16 May 2009, general outgrape:
> Well it's not the 80s anymore and I'd far rather use a gui if one were
> available. 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.

Every time I've looked these they strike me as being grossly simplistic.
Midnight Commander at least had decent command-line integration (does
Thunar? Nautilus doesn't) 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. Notably, every GUI
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 or at
the most selecting files in this directory matched by one glob. Just
five minutes ago I wanted to create a directory tree containing all
directories present under /var, without crossing filesystem boundaries,
with permissions, but without any of the files therein, and without
copying-then-deleting them (there wasn't enough room). Could I have done
that with a GUI? I doubt it.

Languages are more powerful than pointing at things. Humans are
linguistic creatures. Thus the command-line is preferable.

> 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.

I'd be surprised if it didn't require some shell use though. GUI file
managers are horribly limiting (and I say that as a KDE fanatic: KDE is
hardly undersupplied with file managers and I don't use any of them).
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