[SWLUG] Re: Newbie alert!

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 10:21:54PM +0100 or thereabouts, Glenn Booth wrote:
> On 8/17/05, Kris Zani <kriszani at iscavision.com> wrote:
> 
> > they are currently running a tutorial series on using emacs.  quite good 
> > since up till now I have been firing up nano for my console text editing.
> 
> Until recently I always struggled with Vi or Vim, but then I discovered
> vimtutor (why does it take so long to find all this good stuff sometimes?).

So long? Can't be worse than me. I am a happy vim user now, but I
failed to take advantage of vimtutor for about ten years. Ow. (I
don't know how long vim has been around, but I remember meeting vi
a very long time ago. Bad things happened.)

> If anyone is struggling with console editing, vimtutor is definitely a good
> way to learn your way around, and it's all 'doing' rather than 'reading'.

Yes. Don't be afraid to stop when your brain fills up and come back
to it the next day either. Even though it covers the bare basics, 
there are still a lot of basics if you have not met them before.
A little repetition daily is probably a better way to learn it than
one hour of whizzing through it attempting to reach the bottom.

> I've never used nano, so excuse my ignorance.

Nano is a GPL version of pico, an editor which used to come with
pine (a mailer). Pico was extremely simple for new users, particularly
because by default when you started it, help keys were listed at
the top of the page. You had to know what you were doing to get
rid of the list of quick help. At the time pico arrived, this was
pretty much unheard of. 

Telsa