[Sussex] A beginner's guide to GNU/Linux

[Geoff Teale]

linux at oneandoneis2.org wrote:
> I seem to recall being told that vi was a part of the POSIX standard, 
> so should presumably be on pretty much all *nixes in one form or another.

Argh!!!!! No,.    Please stop propagating this myth.  It's the worst 
kind of propaganda.

POSIX is an API standard (or rather a collection of them).  By 
definition it does not mandate that any particular application is 
available, only that libraries and headers with standard names and 
standard functions are made available to programmers.

To my knowledge vi is not *standard* in any regard to UNIX, LINUX or any 
other system.   It is reasonably small and for that reason often in the 
baseline distribution of Linux and UNIX systems (it is essential to 
provide some kind of editor in such an environment).   Emacs is a rather 
larger beast and so it has been comparatively rare for it to form part 
of such a baseline.  In the last few years some distributions have 
started to supersede vi in their baseline distributions with GNU Nano 
which is an order of magnitude smaller and lighter than even vi and 
considerably more intuitive to use for newbies.  I'll freely admit that 
in most situations where the options are Nano or vi I'd plump for vi. 

> I first used vi because it was the only way to set up cron jobs on the 
> Unix system I was on. Other than that I avoided it like the plague and 
> stuck to pico for my limited editing needs - strange things happened 
> when I tried to type something in vi. . .
Pico and Nano are near identical editors.

> Came back to Linux a few years later and needed a better text editor 
> (I was on Slackware) so I tried both vi & emacs out and decided vi 
> suited me better. Couldn't really give a good reason as to why, I just 
> liked it. Still do: Even my Windows machine at work has vim installed 
> on it.

A perfectly valid choice as I said earlier - 99.9% of all arguments put 
forward by vi and emacs users about the superiority of their preferred 
environment come down to "this is what I like".
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--
Geoff Teale
<tealeg at member.fsf.org>