[oclug] Re: word processing

[Adrian Irving-Beer]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 07:27:18AM -0500, Mark Harrison wrote:

> .... would you consider that a reasonable position :-)

No, I agree that one-timers aren't the best comparison point.

I tend to spend a lot of time on the command line with no editor
running.  pico was faster to load on a 486, but Emacs had indenting
and better search and replace features (including regex S&R).  That's
about all I used until I finally decided to learn about CVS
integration, IDE stuff, etc.

vi wasn't an option because I didn't have a clue how to use it.  My
literacy level was one command (':q') to get the heck out.

Years later, I'm super-comfortable with regexes and s// notation (yay
Perl), I'm used to powerful esoteric tools, I have time for extensive
customisation, and I have money to buy things to help me work better
to earn more money.  I say to myself, people must use vi for a
reason, right?  So I buy a book, read how to use it, try it out, and
fall in love.

The exact same story has happened many other times -- C to Perl, bash
to zsh, CVS to arch, pine to mutt, etc.  And each time, after the break-
in period, it seems odd that I got anything done with the old tool.

For me, this is strong evidence that I have a certain mindset, certain
tools match that mindset, and using other tools with a different
emphasis will never quite feel 'right'.

What I hate is when people don't respect that individuality -- they
believe that editing means one thing to everyone, and that therefore,
there must be One True Editor.  That's such an Windows-like mentality
that it's unbelievable these sorts of tool flamewars occur primarily
in free software.

> Comparing eMacs and Vi is like comparing PHP and C (in CGI). You can
> ultimately use either to write a dynamic web page, but they are
> utterly different tools good at doing different things.

Right.  You can compare individual parts of each application.  Not
vague ones like 'user interface'.  I'm talking super-specific
aspects, like 'out-of-the-box IDE integration', 'quality of free
available third party IDE tools', 'usefulness of low-keystroke
portion of commandset', 'degree of finger movement', 'verbosity of
on-line help', etc.

But the bottom line is, editing isn't an average of all those, it's a
weighted average.  For most categories, there's one clear winner, but
everyone puts different weights on each aspect.
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