[Sussex] Vi?

[Jon Fautley]

Mark Harrison wrote:

> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Angelo Servini" <Angelo.Servini at claybrook.co.uk>
> To: <sussex at mailman.lug.org.uk>
> Sent: Monday, July 26, 2004 9:36 AM
> Subject: [Sussex] Vi?
> 
> 
> 
>>Which is better, Vi or Emacs?
> 
> 
> Which is better, a Morgan or a Bentley?

A Skoda!

>>Do they fulfil a similar role or is it worth learning both?
> 
> 
> You have it cracked!
> 
> Emacs is what you use when you spend a lot of your life editing incredibly
> complex stuff and don't have an IDE in which to do it.

Agreed.

> Vi is what you use when you need to edit a configuration file, today,
> please, and don't feel like waiting for Emacs to load.
> 
> TBH, Emacs isn't as bad as all that - the joke was that it used to stand for
> "Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping", but these days, 8 Mb RAM isn't
> really that great a deal unless you're running on older hardware.

Er, no 8Mb is a STUPID amount of RAM for an editor, whichever way you 
look at it. Linux is supposed to be different from Microsoft in the 
respect that it doesn't just attempt to consume all the avaliable system 
resources because it can.

Also, I think that EMACS now uses considerably more than 8Mb RAM, simply 
because of all the random addons that come with it (yes, i know you 
don't have to load them all, but I bet most distro's like 
Mandrake/Redhat/etc do).

Side Note: Just had a call from BTNet (who manage our leased line at the 
office) - as we've had a problem with the connection over the past few 
days, and they've been monitoring it - they called to tell me they'd 
noticed that our line controller card keeps bouncing, and would we like 
to close the fault. I told them we'd like the fault resolved, not just 
closed off and ignored - the guy was somewhat taken aback by this... 
obviously it's unusual for BT to actually FIX a fault :O

Jon