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

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

Nix wrote:
> 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) 
Well the majority of file management is pretty simplistic so I think
that's quite appropriate. Nautilus has the one killer feature of the
command line (tab complete) and I have extended my copy with a bunch of
scripts to automate things I use a lot. One of the most useful is the
'copy full path to clipboard' function, combined with the 'terminal
here' extension it makes flipping into terminal mode less of a pain when
I do need some of that special sauce.


> 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.

>  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
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. 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.

> 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. More powerful rarely, if
ever, sits nicely with easy to use and so power isn't always preferable.
A petaflop supercomputer is very powerful no doubt but I'd prefer an IBM
X60 - far less power but far more useful to me day to day, if I need
supercomputing I can rent time on one. Likewise, if I need to write a
program I'd prefer to write it in Python to C and if I need a document
I'd prefer to bash it out in Office rather than Latex. If I need raw
speed or perfect layout I'll use the latter, but in the vast majority of
cases I don't so I'll use the easy option.


>> 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).
>   

Yes, I'm quite prepared to use shell when I need to, I just try and
minimise the number of times I need to. As I pointed out at the top
Nautilus is nice and extensible with scripting (although I admit it
could be better) so it's generally possible to turn a command line into
a nice graphical context menu item.

Roger.
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