[Sussex] Vi?

[Steve Dobson]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2004 at 12:24:55PM +0100, Jon Fautley wrote:
> Mark Harrison wrote:
> > Angelo Servini write:
> > > Which is better, Vi or Emacs?
> >
> > Which is better, a Morgan or a Bentley?
> 
> A Skoda!

Which Skoda?  At least Morgan do bo produce that may types of car.
 
> > > 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.

But Emacs *is* an IDE.  At one point it was the GUI to Sun's C & C++ compiler
and debugger.
 
> > 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.

Comparing an operating system with a company - mmmmm... I think he meant
Windows not Microsoft.

Will people stop referring to [X]Emacs as just an editor -- it is *much*,
*much* more than that!!!  vi can *only* edit documents (well using the
macros you can get it to do some fun things).  If you only use Emacs as an
just an editor you are missing 90% of it's functionality.  That's like buying 
Microsoft Office and only ever using Word to write ASCII text documents --
it will do it, but it is a waste.

At the end of the day aren't we just getting user choice here?  If you
want a all-singing, all-dancing app then they are available.  If you want
lots of simple programs that can be plugged together then you have that too.
Me I want both, because both have there place.

Steve