[oclug] Vi vs Emacs (was: "OT:" posts)

[Michael P. Soulier]

On 10/10/02 Milan Budimirovic did speaketh:

> I find emacs pretty evil for Perl programming. It has this annoying
> preference for using tabs for indentation, 

So does Vim until you tell it not to. Vi doesn't even have the option.

(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)

> and (worse) I have never been
> able to figure out how to get it to display line numbers.

See setnu.el if you want all numbers displayed. If you just want the current
line, you can turn that on in the modeline.

Also, perl-mode sucks. cperl-mode after GNU Emacs 20.7 is far superior.

;; Alias perl to cperl.
(defalias 'perl-mode 'cperl-mode)

But don't use it in XEmacs. XEmacs' parsing is just as bad as pre-20.7. I
personally recommend GNU Emacs 21+

Note: I code in Perl all day. It works great. My personal favorite is using
tramp to edit code remotely through a multi-hop ssh session, with CVS support.
The vim community's weak attempts at this are quite sad kludges, sort of like
vim's :make functionality. 

In general, vim has better syntax pattern matching, as the community learned
from Emacs' limitations. But, Emacs modes can be fixed, and Vim is lacking in
IDE functionality. That's fine, since quite often you just want an editor, and
a good one. I just wish people would stop claiming it's an IDE. 

Maybe once kvim is stuck in kdevelop, then they can claim that. ;-)

    Mike

-- 
Michael P. Soulier <msoulier at storm.ca>, GnuPG pub key: 5BC8BE08
"...the word HACK is used as a verb to indicate a massive amount
of nerd-like effort."  -Harley Hahn, A Student's Guide to Unix
HTML Email Considered Harmful: http://expita.com/nomime.html
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