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

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

Alain Williams wrote:
> On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 02:44:47PM -0400, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
>
>   
>> Well, as I say _I_ pretty much can but I take your point. If I had to
>> use a terminal based editor I'd still pick Nano or Pico first though
>> (with the -w naturally), as 99% of the time I'd only be editing a
>> smallish text file to fix a problem, something even nano can do right?
>> For productivity stuff like programming, where I might want macros and
>> regex and ftp I would never use a terminal app, not while I'm sitting at
>> a box clicking away 3000 million times a second, what on earth would be
>>     
>
> Oh, how can you really be productive at programming if you need to use
> the mouse to do it ? I can touch type, so I type without looking away from
> the screen. I cannot 'touch mouse', so if I need to use it I need to look
> away, move my hands off the keyboard, move the mouse/click, then move
> my hand back again ... slooooow.
> Part of the reason that I use mutt rather than thunderbird[**].
>
>   
Well my productivity gains come from allowing myself the use of 2 tools
rather than just one. I don't "need" to use 2, but it would be dumb to
deny myself an extra one that can make me more productive.

In the most basic case the mouse is a much faster interface for
highlighting chunks of text that are more than a few lines away from the
cursor, or more than a dozen characters into a line. In the more
complex, more productive case would you care to explain to me how I
would make better use of time saving GUI design tools such as Glade with
a keyboard? Or maybe you can channel Mavis Beacon and touch type several
hundred lines of error free code in the 5 minutes it takes me to build
the core of a GUI app in Glade?

Anyway, what's wrong with having and interface you can SEE? If a menu
bar takes up a significant portion of your screen then you must be using
a pretty low rez screen so it can't be that, and surely not having to
keep every obscure command in your head or resort to man pages every
time you need to do something obscure is a boon right? I mean I can
understand why people NEED terminal based editors, just not why they
would CHOOSE them when they have to option to use a GUI editor... it's
not like they even work significantly differently: they have keyboard
short cuts just like terminal apps (except I can define my own and
change their behaviour in about a second rather than by having to edit a
config file) and GUI editor have the advantage of mice, menus, scroll
bars, context menus, non-modal search and replace dialogues, prettier
font rendering etc.

This reminds me of the old rock and rollers arguing which of the
Beatles, The Stones or The Who were the best while dismissing any music
made since the 70s as "all just thump, thump, thump" ;D


Roger.
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