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

[Nix]

On 18 May 2009, damion yates verbalised:

> On Sun, 17 May 2009, Nix wrote:
>> I said I was a vim luser. I am unsurprised that vim has an equivalent,
>> since vim is obviously trying to turn vi into Emacs. I have no access
>> to vim on most systems I work on in my day job, only XEmacs and icky
>> Solaris vi.
>
> It's '' in vanilla vi, the only enhancement vim has with `` is position
> on the line rather than just returning to the previous line.

I just tried it in Solaris 2.8 vi. It coredumped. (Typical. This is an
editor that refuses to start if you have >132 chars in your terminal
window.)

> I actually found I was able to adapt to adapting, humans are great like
> that.  So I started to use more and more vim features but was able to
> instantly adapt to the more hostile vi only environment on remote boxes.

Humans are indeed surprisingly good at that. My Maltron keyboards at
home and at work have significantly different positions for the
punctuation keys, but I adapted within two weeks and now forget for
months on end that there's any differences at all.

> The same was the case for tcsh/bash vs plain csh on remote boxes.  I
> appeared to need nothing more than notice the prompt was different for
> my brain to realise I needed ^[ for completion rather than ^I.

Yeah, except csh and tcsh's completion is vilely incompetent compared to
bash's (and let's not even *mention* zsh's astoundingly overdesigned
multiple-dispatch tagged pattern-matching completion system).

> Next up, less vs more:
>
> damion at pants:~$ type more
> more is aliased to `less'

YES. I can't imagine why anyone would ever want to use 'more', but I
find people at work using it all the time. Maybe it's just finger
macros: they are a bunch of old farts who don't use ^Z because it's too
newfangled.

> damion at pants:~$ echo $LESS
> -irdXfEP--More--?B(%pj\%)

Mine's relatively simple compared to that:

-i-j2-Q-R-K
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