[Sussex] Straw Poll

[Geoff Teale]

Gareth wrote:
------------
> I guess I my case it was because my first ever use of a Linux or Unix
> environment
> Was through a Telnet connection so you don't have any of the GUI
> software that you 
> would normally have after installing a desktop. And as any of 
> the help I
> would find 
> on the net when I first needed to get things done would tell 
> you to use
> vi, so I 
> did and yes I found it hard the first load of times with there being
> almost now 
> way of just knowing how to use it. 

This is what I meant.  Of course you can use Emacs in the command line (it
predates X by many years, and indeed its direct lineage (in the form of TECO
and pre GNU-Emacs on ITS) it predates the popular adoption of UNIX.  However
the truth was that in the old days when builds were small, Emacs was a big
lump to run on a per-user basis, and vi was just smaller and that outweighed
the fact that Emacs actually tried to be at least slightly user-friendly
without sacrificing the power.

>Even the likes of edit in MsDos had
> the 
> fundamental design to allow easy use for a beginners. But 
> then there are
> probably harder editors to use then vi that just are not that popular.

I can only name one editor I've ever used that was less intuitive than vi,
and that was ed.  Really vi should have died a death many years ago, but by
the time more intuitive editors came about people had learned vi and
appreciated its powerful shorthand - it's success is a triumph of substance
over style (which is a rare thing in this day and age).  

-- 
GJT
Free Software, Free Society. 
http://www.fsf.org   http://www.gnu.org


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