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

[Nic James Ferrier]

Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org> writes:

> Andy Smith wrote:
>> But vim does all those things also.
>>   
> Yes (or at least those things named) .  However I imagine it's more 
> likely that Nic knows how to do them in emacs and not in vi or vim.

Not the case.

I do know how to do those things in vim.

But my justification for using VI (and the line of argument we were
following) is it's widespread nature. There are vi implementations
just about everywhere (though recently I've had to install it on a
debian machine).

However, VIM isn't everywhere. Sometimes it's nvi. I prefer nvi in
fact.

And to my knowledge nvi does not do rectangles.


> Familiarity is a major factor for those kinds of things - trying to 
> convince a devotee of either camp that the other is better is generally 
> a pointless task.    There are also a whole class of complex operations 
> that are technically possible in vim but are much easier to do in emacs 
> because emacs is a full programmable environment , a LISP VM if you 
> will.  I'm equally sure there are many things that are easier in
> vi(m).

I'm sure you're right... though easier is subjective. As you point
out, it's related to familiarity.

-- 
Nic Ferrier
http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk   for all your tapsell ferrier needs