[oclug] Vim Rulez (was Programming Wars - Final Results)

[Michael P. Soulier]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 12:42:49AM -0400, Jon Earle wrote:

> Somewhere, there's always a holy war to be fought. :)

    When we're done here we'll go back to Perl vs. Python. Or better yet,
Gnome vs. KDE. Or bloated, desktop systems vs. plain old X-Windows. Or... I'm
sure we can come up with something. :)

> What, you mean Escape Meta Alt Control Shift?  Or Eight Megs And Constantly
> Swapping?

    I was actually getting used to the interface in the 6 months I forced
myself to use it. I was getting arthritis mind you... The broken Perl modes
finally pushed me over the edge. 

> >     I personally love the interface, even though it takes a certain
> > sophistication in a user to truly appreciate it's raw efficiency. 
> 
> Or a certain sickness.  ;)

    Yeah, that doesn't hurt either. :)

> Actually, I was brought up first on DOS with edlin, then edit.  From there
> to a brief flirtation with Wordstar, then on to pcwrite.  Wordperfect
> eventually replaced pcwrite as my word processor of choice.  Notepad came along
> later but I always preferred plain ol' edit. 

    Hmm. Edlin. Scary. Used it once to hack my autoexec.bat file, and then we
ripped off a better version of DOS that came with edit. PCwrite sounds
familiar. I think I used that... Used Wordperfect for a while in school, then
ripped off MS Word 6. I still have the floppies. I gave up on it when we found
out that rtf wasn't rtf and making Word and Wordperfect talk to each other was
pure hell. 
    Played with Notepad but as the internet was getting big, I kept getting
these pesky Unix files with no carriage returns so they were one long stream
of text in Notepad, so I went back to edit. It actually understood Unix file
format. Then work stuck me full time on a Unix box at work and installed Linux
at home. Used Vi for ages, but I wanted syntax shading, and the hardcoded
buffers sizes in vanilla Vi pissed me off 'cause we have really large files at
work. So, I learned Emacs. 
    After O'Reilly's book on GNU Emacs, I got mildly pissed off that a lot of
the configuration wouldn't work in XEmacs, but I adapted. But, I do Perl 95%
of the time and Emacs' perl modes suck. Moved my code on me incorrectly for
the last time so I shut it down, with a minor tear that I was losing such cool
features as ange-ftp, and the edit-compile speedups, and syntax highlighting,
and I went back to Vi. Then I found Vim. The story has thus far ended there. 
    Oh, and the Vi emulation in Emacs sucks, so don't believe Emacs people
when they tell you that Vi isn't necessary.

> On Linux, let's see.  After deciding that vi sucked (grin), I used pico for a
> bit. It sucked so I went to joe, and have been fairly satisfied since.  I use
> vi for some tasks, and some features of vim are nice, but that damn escape key
> has just got to go.  It's an editor after all... I shouldn't have to
> instruct the editor to actually _edit_... then take a further instruction to
> _stop_ editing.

    pico's built on microemacs anyway, but at least it's light. It should be,
it doesn't do anything. 
    As for the mode paradigm, look at it this way. You cause yourself an extra
keystroke so that all of the keystrokes that follow are very, very efficient.
I've tried navigating via the keyboard in Emacs, hence the arthritis. I don't
like reaching for the mouse, that's inefficient. I'll take the extra keystroke
to go into command mode to be able to navigate in an efficient manner. 
    It's not for everyone, so no one can complain if you don't like it. Just
don't ditch it for the wrong reasons. I understand why Stallman used the
single-mode paradigm, hence why Ctrl and Meta were necessary. He actually used
a fairly consistent "Ctrl to access bound functions", "Meta to access
functions by name" scheme that's rather nice. However, my fingers aren't up
for the keyboard acrobatics, and I'm a guitarist for cryin' out loud. I
understand the paradigm, even if I don't like it. 
    I miss Emacs for something though. Some of the modes are very capable. 

    Here's a question I plan to post and get flamed for on Usenet, but I need
to ask it. If the Unix philosophy involves having small applications working
together to accomplish your task, then does not Emacs violate this philosophy
in attempting to do everything? Same goes for Netscrape?

    Mike

-- 
Michael P. Soulier <msoulier at storm.ca>
"Please reboot for changes to take effect."
Yeah...right...
12:59am up 45 days, Linux 2.2.12