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posted by martyb on Monday February 08 2016, @05:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the break-out-the-asbestos-clothing dept.

Nothing warms the soul on a cold winter morning like a VI vs EMACS flamewar. But when was the last time you saw one? Kids these days, using their javascript-powered editors. And with VI and EMACS both eligible for Social Security, perhaps their fighting days are over. But fear not! A new generation of VI and EMACS is here to fight and fight and fight fight fight.

Neovim (github) is a VIM fork for the 21st century. Removing cruft (like support for the Amiga platform where VIM originated) and other updates.

Spacemacs (github) claims to be a "Mnemonic, Discoverable, Consistent, and Crowd-Funded" (vim and emacs) distribution. Confused? Me too.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @05:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @05:28AM (#300436)
    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 08 2016, @06:47PM

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Monday February 08 2016, @06:47PM (#300786) Journal

      I don't know about you guys but I only use Industry Standard editors like MS Word and PowerPoint.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Kilo110 on Monday February 08 2016, @05:32AM

    by Kilo110 (2853) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 08 2016, @05:32AM (#300437)

    Yeah I said it.

    And only when I absolutely need a CLI editor. Otherwise it's gedit.

    • (Score: 2) by Kell on Monday February 08 2016, @06:50AM

      by Kell (292) on Monday February 08 2016, @06:50AM (#300464)

      I'm with you on both counts. Nano for minimalism but non-obscure functionality in a CLI, and gedit for graphical editing and highlighting in a GUI.

      --
      Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
      • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday February 08 2016, @07:52AM

        by hemocyanin (186) on Monday February 08 2016, @07:52AM (#300482) Journal

        Totally like nano, but what I absolutely hate about gedit is that it doesn't honor middle click paste if you highlight something in gedit, then for whatever reason unhighlight it -- in this situation middle click paste fails. In contrast, if you highlight something outside of gedit in some other program, and then unhighlight it, and do a middle click paste in gedit, it works. It is only text highlighted in gedit that won't paste if it becomes unhighlighted.

        And another thing, sometimes you want word wrap and sometimes you don't. In gedit you always have to go through the preferences to change that whereas in kate or kwrite, you can use a menu or press f10 to switch back and forth.

        Actually, I hate gedit.

        • (Score: 2) by Kell on Monday February 08 2016, @09:41AM

          by Kell (292) on Monday February 08 2016, @09:41AM (#300507)

          I agree with your critiques of gedit, but in my use cases I never seem to tickle those issues. Maybe submit change requests?
          Also, from your username I take it you're royalty?

          --
          Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
          • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:32AM

            by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:32AM (#301063) Journal

            No -- I chose that username because I like to go crabbing and shrimping and somewhere along the line, I learned that these critters don't have hemoglobin (iron based oxygen transport mechanism in blood) but instead, have hemocyanin which is copper based. I've just always thought that was sort of crazy cool -- If aliens exist on planet earth, they're crustaceans. ;-)

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemocyanin [wikipedia.org]

            • (Score: 2) by Kell on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:18AM

              by Kell (292) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:18AM (#301170)

              The joke, of course, was that you must be 'blue blooded'. ;)

              --
              Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Monday February 08 2016, @08:41AM

      by Marand (1081) on Monday February 08 2016, @08:41AM (#300496) Journal

      Yeah I said it.

      And only when I absolutely need a CLI editor. Otherwise it's gedit.

      What I'm reading here is "Kilo110 has really bad taste in editors" :P

      Jokes aside, I'm not into text editor holy wars (or OS ones, programming language ones, etc.); if someone likes something I don't care until they try to force me to use it. Though I seriously don't understand why you'd use gedit for anything unless forced. There are way better GUI editor options available, especially after they Gtk3-ified it into being a pile of shit. Still, if that's what you like, at least it isn't Notepad...

      I'd probably put KDE's Kate [wikipedia.org] at the top as best GUI-only general text editor I've used, followed by Geany [wikipedia.org]. Special mention also goes to Light Table [lighttable.com] for some interesting ideas, but it's programming-specific and very "love it or hate it" in the same way emacs is. Plus it's going through a transitional phase that makes it hard to suggest for general use right now.

      Personally, I mix Kate, nano, and emacs. I can use vi but rarely bother. I use nano for quick edits from the terminal, Kate for quick edits elsewhere, and emacs for everything else.

      I hated emacs for the longest time but its extensibility eventually won me over, along with its usefulness in both GUI and text-only modes. It can be anything from a basic editor to an IDE or anything in between with just a switch of a mode. The major/minor mode thing is a huge win; I can get visual cues like font changes, colour, etc. when editing files like asciidoc or markdown, basic syntax highlighting with programming, or even use something fancier like ham-mode (HTML as markdown) to write in markdown but save the result as HTML. Using that right now to type this comment, in fact (combined with Firefox's It'sAllText! addon). With the right combination of extensions and configuration it can do just about anything you can find in other editors.

      Biggest problem with emacs is the keybindings are weird and uncomfortable at first, but I already had ctrl and capslock swapped which helped a lot. Then I started rebinding things I didn't like. Of course, you could also just search online for novice-friendly keybindings; it seems like everyone eventually decides to make one and post it smewhere.

      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday February 08 2016, @03:14PM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Monday February 08 2016, @03:14PM (#300628)

        I hated emacs for the longest time but its extensibility eventually won me over, along with its usefulness in both GUI and text-only modes.

        You use emacs in window manager mode?! Heresy! :)

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 2) by Marand on Monday February 08 2016, @03:46PM

          by Marand (1081) on Monday February 08 2016, @03:46PM (#300658) Journal

          You use emacs in window manager mode?! Heresy! :)

          Hey, it's worth it for some things. Some modes (like asciidoc-mode) make really good use of the extra display control, like changing font and font sizes in addition to vanilla syntax highlighting. Plus I can use certain key binding combinations in GUI mode that don't generally work in a term, like ctrl+enter or some other ctrl combinations. Whether they work or not is a crapshoot and depends on the term you're using, but they all work fine in GUI mode.

          (Faint-hearted emacs users should avoid reading the rest of this comment)

          I also tend to use the arrow keys instead of C-b/f/n/p. The horror.

          Not only that, but I also use xterm-mouse-mode so I can click things while in text mode, too. It's terrible, I know, but I just expect certain things to work, like using the wheel mouse or clicking inside a window [in the emacs 'window' sense] to activate it. Being able to do that even in text mode is awesome.

          But at least I'm not using one of the various vi modes, right? :)

          • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday February 08 2016, @04:06PM

            by tangomargarine (667) on Monday February 08 2016, @04:06PM (#300674)

            Since I started a little over a month ago I'm still trying to get emacs to work exactly the same in Cygwin as it does in a "native" Linux terminal, and trying not to develop too many Cygwin-specific bad habits like being able to use a scroll wheel.

            Still wrestling inconclusively with trying to force CC-mode to do what I want, too. I'm about halfway there with some hackety custom macros :P There's nothing like trying to get emacs to interpret tabs a certain way to get one to appreciate how hairy a problem it apparently is.

            --
            "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
            • (Score: 2) by Marand on Monday February 08 2016, @05:45PM

              by Marand (1081) on Monday February 08 2016, @05:45PM (#300748) Journal

              You have my sympathy. I mostly avoid Windows, but when I do use it I end up with cygwin ports of stuff and there's all sorts of subtle inconsistency with how things work. Still, it's only way I know of to get mosh [wikipedia.org] support, so it's a necessary evil. I also had trouble with cygwin's emacs, but I can't remember what it was anymore, something related to ssl/tls stuff I think. I got sick of messing with it and just installed one of the 32-bit Windows builds from ftp.gnu.org [gnu.org] instead. I don't use Windows enough to be willing to spend much time on something like that :P

              For what it's worth, though, being able to use the scrollwheel in a term isn't a cygwin oddity. That's what I was talking about when I mentioned using xterm-mouse-mode in terms. It won't work on the console, but it's definitely viable in a term, even on remote hosts. I can ssh into my VPS, run a remote copy of emacs there, and still use the mouse the same way as locally. Also worth noting that you can set your TERM variable to xterm-256color and get wider colour support. Not only does the UI itself take advantage of it (themes, helm, etc.) but minor modes like rainbow-mode (changes the colour of common names and #FF00FF type codes for quick visual idea of what the colour is) also work with it as well.

              What finally turned me into an emacs user was the addition of package management into emacs a few years ago. I found out about it at random when I fired up emacs once again to give it a try before abandoning it...and then I found M-x package-list-packages and that was it, I became an emacs user. I love configuration options and extensibility (I also like KDE apps with their huge piles of settings usually...) Before long I added a bunch of packages to add features I wanted and a custom .el file I source in from init.el that contains all my settings and tweaks related to it, like assigning file extensions to various modes, rebinding keys for others, etc.

              The first things I installed were wn-mode (M-[0-9] window swapping) and windsize (C-S-[arrows] for window sizing), and I still get a ton of use out of them. Once that was sorted, I started adding editor modes like ham, markdown, asciidoc, clojure, rainbow, etc. and was happy for a while. Then I learned about helm and replaced M-x with helm-M-x, and things were good again. After that I discovered powerline, tabbar, and most recently, I installed neotree because I wanted a sidebar-type filesystem tree like LightTable has.

              No idea what will be next, but so far so good. It's the first time an editor has gotten me to stop using Kate for everything.

      • (Score: 2) by everdred on Monday February 08 2016, @05:13PM

        by everdred (110) on Monday February 08 2016, @05:13PM (#300731) Journal

        > especially after they Gtk3-ified it into being a pile of shit

        I know you had other objections to gedit, if that's what's holding others back, there's the Pluma [wikipedia.org] fork.

        • (Score: 2) by Marand on Monday February 08 2016, @05:58PM

          by Marand (1081) on Monday February 08 2016, @05:58PM (#300764) Journal

          Nice to know. It's still not my thing -- gedit's a bit too notepad-y for my taste and I generally don't like the GNOME approach to configuration (or lack thereof), plus I have some gripes about GtkSourceView* -- but it's good to see that someone's still maintaining the saner version for people that liked it.

          * Used for the syntax highlighting in gedit and other gtk apps. It's a pain in the ass when you start wanting to adjust anything.

    • (Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Monday February 08 2016, @04:04PM

      by M. Baranczak (1673) on Monday February 08 2016, @04:04PM (#300672)
      If you ever get a job that requires administering remote servers, or, hell, doing ANYTHING on remote servers, then sooner or later you'll have to learn vi. And it's a right pain in the ass at first, but once you learn the basic commands, you'll realize that you can work much faster than with nano. And that's how they get you.
      • (Score: 2) by edIII on Monday February 08 2016, @09:26PM

        by edIII (791) on Monday February 08 2016, @09:26PM (#300919)

        but once you learn the basic commands, you'll realize that you can work much faster than with nano.

        Lies, Lies, and Damned Lies.

        There are no basic commands in vi, and in fact, not a single command to do anything, but commands *plural*. Ndd to delete a fucking line? Are they fucking insane? That's what a single press of the delete key is for on a line that only possesses CRLF. Nano at least fucking gets it. CTRL-K to delete a whole line. Useful. The delete key in vi? Doesn't do a damn fucking thing close to actually deleting a line, or a character, or fucking anything unless you've managed to discover the konami secret combination to that mode in which the delete key now actually fucking deletes something.

        Why the holy fuck do you start an EDITING program in a state in which no editing can occur? Why the holy fuck do you need a text based *hidden* menu navigation program (with no visible clues as to data entry mode) to enter 19 trillion different fucking editing states to do work in the first place? Yeah, if I was masochistic enough I could learn to work with an editor that requires 500% more keystrokes to get a simple fucking job done (Ndd versus Delete). Nano is a blissful and natural way to edit a file. I press delete, and the line goes away. Nice. I didn't press this key to enter this mode, and then this key to delete the line, then these keys to exit the mode, then these keys to ..........

        You're at least right about one thing. Vi is an absolute fucking requirement for systems administration. You cannot modify a cron job (safely so they say) without crontab, and you cannot modify sudo permission safely without visudo. So they say again. What you can do though is use nano for the main changes, and then remember how to delete a single fucking character in vi. That's all you need for it to close and then do whatever validation it does to perform the operation "safely". I tend to put a line at the end with a single 'x' character that can then be removed with the specialized vi program.

        Vi just needs to fucking die at every level in the OS. It didn't teach me how to do anything other than pull hair, but motivated me to learn how to replace strings in nano, and then just how to do with it sed. That's how bad and frustrating vi actually is. I find it more useful to use other programs combined to get the same function, from the command line. Vi was my *primary* motivating factor to understand a lot of other programs. I learned to use grep, because loading up a file in vi to search for something was incredibly painful. At every turn I was told to go back into vi from documentation or howtos, I figured out a way to do it with other programs instead. So I do have to thank it for the horrific environment that helped me learn Linux in the first place.

        Much like how Internet Explorer is most often used to load Firefox or Chrome, vi is simply there because nano hasn't been installed from the repo yet.

        Sed on the command line is a faster and easier program than that maelstrom of confusing fucking steaming shit: vi. I would rather spend eternity speaking with only regular expressions, than use vi for a single day in the data center. There is nothing basic about vi. That would be merciful, and vi wasn't programmed with mercy in mind. Just pain :) That's all I got to say about vi today.....

        P.S - This was written without vi.

        --
        Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday February 08 2016, @07:36PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 08 2016, @07:36PM (#300828) Journal

      And that's why there aren't vi vs. emacs fights anymore. If you've got a fancy desktop, then you use a good graphic editor with easy options. (I prefer geany, but kate works. I used to use gedit, but gnome3 ruined it for me. Perhaps it's since been fixed, but I see no reason to look while my current tools are satisfactory.)

      And if you have a low resource system, something smaller than vi, and easy to use when you don't have the commands memorized, like nano, is better. (Back in the day WordStar used the same concept to get people who didn't already know the program up to speed quickly. Come to think of it, so did UCSD Pascal.)

      I know of no really small editor better than nano. It's ugly, but I don't use it often enough for that to be a problem. There are probably others, but nano is most talked about...and it's usually praised.

      vi and emacs were both (mainly) desktop editors. When windowing desktop became common, they adaptations were insufficient. So they are fading towards extinction. (There will probably always be some systems that fit the scale where they are optimal, but the proportion is declining towards zero.) Smaller systems are usually cross-developed. And even nano is a tight squeeze on some of the current systems.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 08 2016, @05:47AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 08 2016, @05:47AM (#300441) Journal

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_nano [wikipedia.org]

    I never got into that great flamewar, personally.

    Not to be confused with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_GSU5pj_Rc [youtube.com]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @05:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @05:48AM (#300442)

    ^X^B
    Damn it! Why can't I switch to another topic?

    {esc}-x soylent-ac-mode

    Ahhh...that's better!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @03:27PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @03:27PM (#300640)

      I believe you mean C-x C-b.

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by AudioGuy on Monday February 08 2016, @05:52AM

    by AudioGuy (24) on Monday February 08 2016, @05:52AM (#300445) Journal

    Nano in an xterm so I can resze, cut and paste, typically multiple open files.

    Nedit for pure desktop use, or if I need macros.

    I don't need my syntax colored, or cursor jumping around to show me where my brackets end, or other such annoying stuff. I already know the syntax, unless mayb

    e I am only two days into learning a new language.

    Much rather have a simple, efficient editor plus multple workspaces I can arrange to the specific task at hand rather than some integrated thing that is never quite right.

    I almost always have emacs available but never use it any more. It is a relic of a different age.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by hemocyanin on Monday February 08 2016, @07:56AM

      by hemocyanin (186) on Monday February 08 2016, @07:56AM (#300483) Journal

      I don't need my syntax colored, or cursor jumping around to show me where my brackets end, or other such annoying stuff. I already know the syntax, unless mayb

      e I am only two days into learning a new language.

      Maybe you should look into some syntax helpers for English. :-P

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bziman on Monday February 08 2016, @05:55AM

    by bziman (3577) on Monday February 08 2016, @05:55AM (#300447)

    I started using Unix something like twenty-five years ago on some pretty slow hardware. Some of the machines in the lab had emacs... when you felt like waiting for it to load. But all of them had vi, and vi was always really snappy, despite the ancientness of the computers.

    And for many years after that, those were really the only two choices, and generally, vi continued to be the only editor that was SURE to be on every system. So I never had a reason to learn emacs. I still use vi today because it's still on every computer I use, it's still extremely responsive, and after twenty-five years, I'm such an expert at it that it would be silly for me to throw it away and start learning something new.

    A few years back, I started using Eclipse for Java development because the job required it, but even now, if I'm writing code at home, even Java, I still use vi.

    I can't tell you how many times I've inserted random sequences of h's, j's, k's, and l's in Google Docs and other "modern" editors, trying to navigate using keyboard commands that just seem automatic to me.

    • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday February 08 2016, @06:20AM

      by krishnoid (1156) on Monday February 08 2016, @06:20AM (#300453)

      EMACS does stand for 'Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping'. So just considering its editor function, it's tiny.

    • (Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday February 08 2016, @06:30AM

      by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Monday February 08 2016, @06:30AM (#300457) Journal

      Personally I use jVi under Netbeans. You might want to check out Vrapper.

      Unfortunately, both plugins are hosted on SourceForge, but jVi can be installed from Netbeans itself. It's been a while since I've used Eclipse so ymmv. jVi is slightly buggy but better than using Netbeans' “modern” controls.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @10:35AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @10:35AM (#300512)

      I can't tell you how many times I've inserted random sequences of h's, j's, k's, and l's in Google Docs and other "modern" editors, trying to navigate using keyboard commands that just seem automatic to me.

      Check your QWERTY privilege, shitlord. I'd love to use Vi[m] or Emacs, but h, j, k, and i are in the most stupidest of places on the Dvorak keyboard, and they're not even laid out like QWERTY's WASD (or its superior ESDF). Remap the keys you say? Well, that would be fine if all the other damn key combos weren't cluttered up with bullshit and there were a simple way to not cause collisions while making mnemonics for them.

      It's been such a pain to keep remaping the damn keys over the years every time I upgrade or find myself on a remote machine without my config, I gave up and started working on a little editor with just the features I need. Rather than editing a file on a remote server using the crusty and batshit stupid VT101 terminal emulation, the editor manages files remotely via scp or FTP so my settings are always on my machine. Fuck the "thin client" model in the goat ass.

      • (Score: 1) by modest on Monday February 08 2016, @03:46PM

        by modest (3494) on Monday February 08 2016, @03:46PM (#300659)

        This killed my interest in DVORAK. Actually, I didn't even get this far: copy, cut, and paste keyboard shortcuts become awful. DVORAK wasn't worth the trouble no matter how hip it would have made me.

      • (Score: 2) by Marand on Monday February 08 2016, @04:21PM

        by Marand (1081) on Monday February 08 2016, @04:21PM (#300686) Journal

        WASD (or its superior ESDF)

        ESDF superiority, hell yeah! Everyone seems to have forgotten the One True Mapping for gaming movement.

        I gave up and started working on a little editor with just the features I need. Rather than editing a file on a remote server using the crusty and batshit stupid VT101 terminal emulation, the editor manages files remotely via scp or FTP so my settings are always on my machine

        Dude, you're massively over-engineering the solution here, remote file access with local apps has been a solved problem for a very long time.

        If you use emacs, you can use TRAMP mode [emacswiki.org] to do the job. Or, if you'd rather go for something more program-agnostic, we've had the fish protocol [wikipedia.org] since the late '90s, which has wide support, especially among KDE applications. Speaking of of KDE, any KDE app can also use sftp:// directly as an openable location just like a local directory. GNOME has something similar, gvfs or something like that.

        Or, if you want for something even more transparent, there's always sshfs [github.com]. Doesn't rely on application support at all, so it works with anything. As far as any program is concerned, it's just another directory on another mount point, just like any directory on any disk. You can even get fancy and use it in conjunction with other filesystem tools, like mounting a remote image file via loopback, or using the sshfs mountpoint as the source for an encFS mountpoint, which allows you to access a local mountpoint, write files to it, and encFS transparently stuffs the encrypted file into the sshfs directory. sshfs then pushes the file to the remote machine, and your program knows nothing about the uploading or the encryption. :)

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 08 2016, @01:13PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 08 2016, @01:13PM (#300562)

      I can't tell you how many times I've inserted random sequences of h's, j's, k's, and l's in Google Docs and other "modern" editors, trying to navigate using keyboard commands that just seem automatic to me.

      Although I live on the other side, the dark side of the force, I can sympathize with the general problem and I had to install firemacs into firefox so C-w C-y M-f M-b C-s and all that work "correctly" in firefox. There are likely alternatives for inferior editors keybindings.

      I get myself into a lot of trouble assuming the whole world has smartparens support. Thats annoying. What the world needs is a CLI upgrade where not only do all CLI have readline support, but they all have full emacs client support so I get smartparens or whatever right on the command line.

    • (Score: 2) by kbahey on Monday February 08 2016, @03:52PM

      by kbahey (1147) on Monday February 08 2016, @03:52PM (#300662) Homepage

      Absolutely agree.

      I started UNIX 29 years ago, and vi was the only thing that is on every system (as well as ed, and ex, remember those?)

      For that reason, vi (then vim) became the editor that my fingers have muscle memory for ...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @06:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @06:00AM (#300448)

    Copyright (C) 1988-2009 JASSPA (www.jasspa.com)

    Also a Nano version that doesn't need to be installed (on Win OS).

  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday February 08 2016, @06:04AM

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Monday February 08 2016, @06:04AM (#300450) Homepage Journal

    --
    :q![return]
    $ emacs[return]
    All the vi you'll ever need to know
    --

    In the end, it's all about your personal preferences. I cut my teeth with text editing on ED/EDT [wikipedia.org] and the epsilon programmer's editor [lugaru.com] back in the early 1980s.

    Interestingly, a clone of ED/EDT [sourceforge.net] and Lugaru's epsilon [tucows.com] are both available.

    epsilon is an emacs-like editor and I moved to emacs a long, long time ago. I can use vi if I need to do so, but prefer emacs. Is it the better editor? Reasonable people can disagree.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
    • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday February 08 2016, @06:23AM

      by krishnoid (1156) on Monday February 08 2016, @06:23AM (#300454)

      Is it the better editor?

      Perhaps, but I definitely prefer its calculator [emacswiki.org].

    • (Score: 2) by NullPtr on Monday February 08 2016, @08:48PM

      by NullPtr (3786) on Monday February 08 2016, @08:48PM (#300892) Journal

      My favourite was some page that had:

      If you're using vim, type:

      vim /etc/some.file

      If you're using emacs, type:

      sudo apt-get remove emacs
      sudo apt-get install vim
      vim /etc/some.file

    • (Score: 2) by J053 on Monday February 08 2016, @10:29PM

      by J053 (3532) <dakineNO@SPAMshangri-la.cx> on Monday February 08 2016, @10:29PM (#300980) Homepage
      M-x edt-emulation-on

      You're welcome
      • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday February 08 2016, @11:37PM

        by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Monday February 08 2016, @11:37PM (#301032) Homepage Journal

        M-x edt-emulation-on

        You're welcome

        Thanks!

        I said I cut my teeth on edt, not that I liked it.

        In fact, IIRC, starting in 1992 or so, I made sure to always install emacs on any VMS (or any other OS as well) systems I worked on. That made me much happier.

        I'll check out the EDT emulation one of these days -- if I'm feeling masochistic.

        --
        No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Techwolf on Monday February 08 2016, @06:26AM

    by Techwolf (87) on Monday February 08 2016, @06:26AM (#300456)

    When I first started using Linux via Redhat distro. Every time I ran this one program, Tripwire I think, this screen would pop up with this editor, I've tried everything to exit it. I ended up doing an alt-f2 to switch to another command line and did a ps and kill the offending program so Tripwire would finished running. Yes, I did use Infoseek to look for the answer. ctrl-x did not work, shift-: (colon) q did not work, it would literally type ":q" on the screen. So every Infoseek answer did not work. I still to this day don't know to quit that editor, thankfully, its no longer the default editor and I always to make sure the default editor is nano whenever possible.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @06:36AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @06:36AM (#300460)

      Ugggh. hated Nano, back when it was the internal editor Pine. Well, i really hated Pine, actually. It was internally developed at UW. Other email clients were more better to use, but Pine was set up as the default on the staff/student servers. Bleh. On the other hand, it did provide a level of commonality across server environments that VMS Mail, unix mail, and other MUAs, did not provide.

      nano, the notepad.exe of unix/linux...

      -Univ of Washington 1986-1991...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @06:39AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @06:39AM (#300462)

      echo "export EDITOR=/bin/ed" >> ~/.bashrc

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @03:56PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @03:56PM (#300665)

        "Real Men"(tm) use ed.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Whoever on Monday February 08 2016, @06:40AM

    by Whoever (4524) on Monday February 08 2016, @06:40AM (#300463) Journal

    ZZ

    It's a synonym for ":q", but much easier to type.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @08:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @08:25AM (#300491)

      I didn't but thanks for the lesson

      or

      is this a WOOSH situation and you are cack handedly describing the emacs user experience?

      :wq

    • (Score: 2) by kbahey on Monday February 08 2016, @03:54PM

      by kbahey (1147) on Monday February 08 2016, @03:54PM (#300664) Homepage

      I know it.

      But it is actually a synonym for ":wq!", not ":q".

      For me, my fingers' muscle memory is ":wq", so that is what I use, not ZZ.

      • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday February 08 2016, @04:22PM

        by Whoever (4524) on Monday February 08 2016, @04:22PM (#300687) Journal

        Yes, I was wrong, but, unless you override the default, so are you. It's a synonym for ":wq" (no "!").

    • (Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Monday February 08 2016, @04:40PM

      by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Monday February 08 2016, @04:40PM (#300701) Journal

      I learned about that command just a couple of days ago and had already forgotten about it. This is my main problem with vim: just too many commands to remember and if I didn't have a cheat sheet right next to my desk I would have been lost a lot of times already.
      That said: vim is my favorite editor, although I will never remember if d5[down] will delete five lines starting below or including the line my cursor is standing. I usually end up deleting one line to little.
      It is also very good at handling large files (I do get a lot of XML files >20MB).

  • (Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday February 08 2016, @06:52AM

    by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Monday February 08 2016, @06:52AM (#300465)

    The reason I learned, and still use, vi is the same reason i always say people should learn it (even if they hated it) was that just about every distribution I've ever used, from Solaris7 to the latest Ubuntu comes with vi. A few of the micro kernel/embedded systems didn't but those have always been edge cases.

    vi was pretty much the only editor you could count on being in a default *nix install, now a days not so much. Many modern distros have nano, gedit, or any number of other simple terminal based editors as part of their default installs.

    There is nothing wrong with other editors, which one you use is a matter of personal choice. As long as it does what you need it to do, and its going to be in the base install of whatever your distro you work with who cares what editor you use?

    --
    "Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Monday February 08 2016, @09:01AM

      by Marand (1081) on Monday February 08 2016, @09:01AM (#300500) Journal

      Yup, that's why I learned to use vi as well, though I almost never use it for anything outside of that. However, I think that argument for learning it is going away. Just about everything seems to install nano by default as well, and it's far more convenient as an "occasional use" editor in those situations.

      Still, that's a poor reason to always use an editor. Different tools for different jobs and all. Learn something that's always going to be available for when you can't install things, but also find and learn something you like better for when you can, in my opinion.

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by Francis on Monday February 08 2016, @11:23AM

        by Francis (5544) on Monday February 08 2016, @11:23AM (#300526)

        But, once you've learned the basics everything else is inefficient. Vi has a hell of a learning curve, but once you get it, it's fast to use and available on pretty much everything but Windows by default.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @12:18PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @12:18PM (#300546)

          This. I was a happy nedit user for over 5 years when I got a job as a sysadmin, and they had me install and configure Solaris machines for a week straight (this was in the late 90s, btw). After a week of having to put up with vi, I found myself typing :w, h, k, etc. into nedit, so I gave up and just started using vi for everything. Started out as a total vi hater, now it's all I use. Grows on you like a fungus... :)

      • (Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday February 08 2016, @06:06PM

        by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Monday February 08 2016, @06:06PM (#300769)

        Still, that's a poor reason to always use an editor.

        I never said I only used vi :), Just that I leaned it and advocate others learning it too because its almost everywhere.

        Different tools for different jobs and all. Learn something that's always going to be available for when you can't install things, but also find and learn something you like better for when you can, in my opinion.

        Totally agree, There are several other editors I know and use depending on the situations. The more options you can bring to the party the better IMHO.

        --
        "Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 08 2016, @01:28PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 08 2016, @01:28PM (#300568)

      vi was pretty much the only editor you could count on being in a default *nix install, now a days not so much. Many modern distros have nano, gedit, or any number of other simple terminal based editors as part of their default installs.

      In the modern era your $HOME is probably a NFS mount across every machine on the LAN, or something more exotic (AFS, etc).

      Also puppet and friends mean you tell puppet to install vim and emacs on all the machines on the LAN and completely hands off every machine has it. Or your cloudyness just clones a box that has them both installed anyway.

      Between tramp and SSHFS I'm usually running emacs on my local machine for speed, but editing stuff on some giant internal cloudy dev box a couple states away (honestly I don't even know what state its in right now, although I think its in the USA). Things can get hairy if by the magic of sshfs I am messing with multiple machines at the same time.

      The biggest problems I've found with shared $HOME over the last couple decades are cross distro and cross version. Only slightly off topic I like the way R has multiple local libraries, I have R/amd64-portbld-freebsd10.1-library for new boxes and for legacy linux stuff I have R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library. Its hilarious when I install plyr or whatever on the freebsd box and forget its not installed on the legacy linux boxes or similar. I wish emacs (or vim) had namespace support for multiple architectures sharing the same $HOME. Or maybe I'm better off with it not doing that because sometimes it is a PITA? Yeah I know it probably wouldn't be hard to write a beast of a giant wrapper in init.el but I'd like a formalish widely deployed standard rather than a hack.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Monday February 08 2016, @07:23AM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Monday February 08 2016, @07:23AM (#300471)

    I use both vi(m) and (x)emacs. It's simple really. Vi(m) is really quick to open, and simple to do some stuff (line swaps etc).

    X(emacs) is good for the whole "bit of coding , make compile, debug" cycle. And as an aside, you can also print a massive amount of source code in nice colour-font-face and indented to an A2 plotter!!!!

    Yes, you can have a massive wallposter of source code, which is really very useful to get familiar with a big , complex piece of scientific code....

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by VanderDecken on Monday February 08 2016, @07:28AM

    by VanderDecken (5216) on Monday February 08 2016, @07:28AM (#300472)

    I picked up emacs early on for programming tasks, but quickly learned vi for sysadmin things since emacs was not typically installed by default. Even today, I'll change the editor I use, without thinking about it, based on what I'm doing at the time.

    Aside:
    emacs = "eight megs and constantly swapping". That was funnier when my UNIX machine was fully populated with 8MB of memory. Now other programs will happily suck up 8GB. Sigh.

    --
    The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
  • (Score: 4, Funny) by q.kontinuum on Monday February 08 2016, @07:28AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Monday February 08 2016, @07:28AM (#300473) Journal

    ... for quite some time. Only the built-in editor sucked.

    --
    Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @07:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @07:33AM (#300477)

    Between its Byzantine feature set and its licence that reminds me there are deprived children in Uganda, vim offers and asks too much. I'm a simple person, so I'll be sticking with nvi [google.com] until I die.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @08:06AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @08:06AM (#300485)

      Agreed. Vim is the worst of both worlds. Tons of irrelevant features, that takes days to figure out how to turn off, just to get it to act like a vi editor.

      I can compile and install nvi faster than I can get vim to act like a vi.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @02:08PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @02:08PM (#300587)

        Agreed. Vim is the worst of both worlds. Tons of irrelevant features, that takes days to figure out how to turn off, just to get it to act like a vi editor.

        Come now, :se compatible is not that onerous.

        http://superuser.com/questions/543317/what-is-compatible-mode-in-vim [superuser.com]

        I used vim in compatibility mode for years so that when I used an original vim on a server or something, it was not uncomfortable.

    • (Score: 2) by DNied on Monday February 08 2016, @02:49PM

      by DNied (3409) on Monday February 08 2016, @02:49PM (#300610)

      Another vote for nvi from me!

      I switched away from Vim after realizing there were about 10 different variables to set or unset, in order to completely turn off every possible form of auto-indenting (not to mention that the son of a bitch was still auto-indenting after tweaking them all!)

      Got better things to do than deal with such madness. Nvi is the real thing.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @08:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @08:02AM (#300484)

    I cut my teeth on EDLIN. That is why I no longer have any teeth. And it is not because I am old. Micro$oft made my teeth fallout at the ripe old age of 24. Then they came for my kidneys. VisualBASIC, kidney donation optional, they said! Ha! And then, at long last, they teased be with the promise of salvation, RegEdit. Abandon hope, all ye who enter there, or who use systemd. Now I am missing both my gonads. They tell me that I myself severed them with my own teeth, but I know that is not possible, because EDLIN. So all you who debate the virtues of vi or EMACS, please remember, and send your prayers, to those of us who did not discover the UNIX way until we were toothless, ball-less, but not quite blind. For none is so blind as those who willingly install systemd. And none is so brainless, as in never having had a brain, as those who "upgrade" to Windows X.

  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday February 08 2016, @08:25AM

    by RamiK (1813) on Monday February 08 2016, @08:25AM (#300489)

    Everyone knows you use ed over TTL and sam when you have a mouse.
    Here, the "latest": https://github.com/deadpixi/sam [github.com] :D

    --
    compiling...
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @12:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @12:17PM (#300545)
      a
      Is sam the standard text editor? I think not! I don't want a samitor, that's not even a word!
      .
      w comment
      94
      q
      • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday February 08 2016, @12:59PM

        by RamiK (1813) on Monday February 08 2016, @12:59PM (#300555)

        sam -d ;)

        --
        compiling...
  • (Score: 1) by Corelli's A on Monday February 08 2016, @08:32AM

    by Corelli's A (1772) on Monday February 08 2016, @08:32AM (#300493)

    You kids and your vi and emacs. The RAND editor is where it's at.

  • (Score: 1) by den Os on Monday February 08 2016, @09:17AM

    by den Os (2340) on Monday February 08 2016, @09:17AM (#300503) Homepage
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Zedrick on Monday February 08 2016, @10:29AM

    by Zedrick (2648) on Monday February 08 2016, @10:29AM (#300510)
    > Removing cruft (like support for the Amiga platform where VIM originated)

    Cruft, eh? Why not remove cruft like support for computers in general? Take your forked VIM and shove it up your Ipad.
  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday February 08 2016, @10:50AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday February 08 2016, @10:50AM (#300515) Journal

    I remember the holy wars that blazed across millions of systems, consumed untold energies, and left tears, suffering, and devastation in their wake.

    This is like a pillow fight with Ty stuffed animals wrapped in snuggies.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday February 08 2016, @10:53AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday February 08 2016, @10:53AM (#300517) Journal

    I must say I am rather encouraged by the lack of vitriol in this discussion. Who would have thought that possible during the time of jihad? It says to me that there is hope, that the bitterest of enemies can put aside their enmity and move on.

    That, or it's a "dogs and cats living together," sign of the apocalypse kind of deal.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @11:20AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @11:20AM (#300525)

      I must say I am rather encouraged by the lack of vitriol in this discussion. Who would have thought that possible during the time of jihad? It says to me that there is hope, that the bitterest of enemies can put aside their enmity and move on.

      All the people who really cared have died, retired, or left the industry for greener pastures.

      Now it's gEdit vs. Nano?

      Really?

      I weep for the future.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @02:14PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @02:14PM (#300592)

      I must say I am rather encouraged by the lack of vitriol in this discussion. Who would have thought that possible during the time of jihad?

      Possible only because the entire emacs camp is still entrenched at that site which shall not be named. Most people who are so unconcerned by UX issues that they think emacs is somehow okay saw beta as an improvement. They're also all fine with systemd.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @03:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @03:20PM (#300632)

        Possible only because the entire emacs camp is still entrenched at that site which shall not be named. Most people who are so unconcerned by UX issues that they think emacs is somehow okay saw beta as an improvement. They're also all fine with systemd.

        Oh wow, I love it. So you're saying:

        Beta site = Emacs = SystemD

        ?

        I'm guessing you could approach it on a couple of different levels. The main one being "bloat/features." Beta's bloated UI would be analogous to Emacs and SystemD's feature creep. Is there anything more, like the mentality of the users involved?

        PLEASE, AC, expound on this, I need to hear more along these lines.

        • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday February 08 2016, @08:46PM

          by tangomargarine (667) on Monday February 08 2016, @08:46PM (#300887)

          Beta wasn't bloated. They stripped OUT the features we actually wanted.

          Emacs : systemd might be a bit more apt, but emacs is mind-explodingly customizable whereas systemd...

          --
          "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday February 08 2016, @03:23PM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Monday February 08 2016, @03:23PM (#300634)

        Not this emacs user. Detested beta, not a fan of systemd; like emacs.

        Admittedly I was one of 3 emacs users out of the dozen or so on the team when I learned it (about 3 years ago). Considering I've never run across any other modal program that I can think of besides vi, and we're all used to modifier key combos: emacs.

        Also multiple window support and being able to run a command line inside of it means you don't need to constantly pop in and out. And I'm not a server guy so my use case is development anyway. So as long as emacs is installed (or they let me install Cygwin on my machine) the traditional pro-vi arguments above all fall flat.

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @03:35PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @03:35PM (#300647)

          I myself detest systemd and love emacs. Not sure how you correlate the two, really.

          And M-x she [enter] is permanently wired into my neurons, as well.

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday February 08 2016, @11:11AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday February 08 2016, @11:11AM (#300520) Journal

    I really love vim. I have never encountered anything as efficient and powerful. With an absolute economy of motion I can sweeping, exact changes to any of my documents. It keeps getting better, too, though I have used it for 25 years; there's always another cool, useful trick or tip around the corner. That's without even touching the vim scripting language, which was a quantum step up when I finally got into it 10 years ago. Another step up was discovering Vimperator, the plugin for Firefox that puts a vi-like overlay on browsing. I hardly touch the mouse anymore now. It's wonderful to be able to switch back and forth between work in vim and the web without taking my hands out of position or having to switch frames reference in the interface.

    That's not to say other editors don't have virtues or any of the features I like in vim. It's just that I've never needed to look, because there's nothing in vim that I've ever found lacking.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by CoolHand on Monday February 08 2016, @03:10PM

      by CoolHand (438) on Monday February 08 2016, @03:10PM (#300624) Journal
      I completely agree with you Phoenix.. It's also why I've been a big proponent of Neovim.. Its changes should lead to it being used as a backend to power more things like vimperator and "vi-modes" in other applications.
      --
      Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
  • (Score: 2) by mtrycz on Monday February 08 2016, @11:17AM

    by mtrycz (60) on Monday February 08 2016, @11:17AM (#300522)

    Sublime is easy to pickup and programmable in Python, the defaults are reasonable, and if you need extra functionality I just search for plugins right from the editor (although there was an extra step to add that one installer plugin).
    No going through tutorials, or "years to master" it. Several builtin features are really great for when you need them (like edit multiple places at once, file search is pretty fast, etc.)
    There's a very similar open source alternative, Atom, but haven't tried it yet.

    Some of the contributed plugins aren't working just right, but it was sthe same with emacs the several times I tried.

    For commandline nano, rarely have the need for much more than that. It also looks nice once you've set up highlighting.

    --
    In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
    • (Score: 2) by fnj on Monday February 08 2016, @11:43AM

      by fnj (1654) on Monday February 08 2016, @11:43AM (#300535)

      You're joking, right? You're the first commenter to boost something that COSTS FRIGGIN MONEY. The rest of us can't comprehend why anyone would spend money on a text editor when there are plenty of superb free ones. this takes me back to the bad old days before the FSF.

      • (Score: 2) by mtrycz on Monday February 08 2016, @02:32PM

        by mtrycz (60) on Monday February 08 2016, @02:32PM (#300600)

        The fullfeatured demo version lasts a lifetime with just an unobtrusive "buy me" popup every now and then. Anyway Atom looks very similar and is open source if you like.

        --
        In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
      • (Score: 1) by UncleRage on Monday February 08 2016, @08:41PM

        by UncleRage (5109) on Monday February 08 2016, @08:41PM (#300884)

        For what it's worth... I'll second SublimeText.

        I'm not opposed to paying for software; if it works well, looks good and the developer has a sensible roadmap. Why should I be? Yes, there's a plethora of solid, FOSS and/or simply free software out there... but if you find something that you like, what's wrong with paying for it?

        I know a guy here at work that complains about PuTTY vocally and frequently (as in daily) -- and ridicules me for paying for ZOC. Yet, I'm not the one moaning and griping about a tool I choose to work with.

        Back to the topic du jour: I'm part of an interesting trend presented here: If I'm remote and I need more than to cat a file, Nano it is. Which feels weird as I remember thinking, "Well... sure. I'll try an improved Vi!" some twenty something years ago.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @10:46PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @10:46PM (#300997)

        It would appear mtrycz has also paid money toward this site we're posting on. Coincidence?

  • (Score: 1) by ealbers on Monday February 08 2016, @12:09PM

    by ealbers (5715) on Monday February 08 2016, @12:09PM (#300542)

    TECO LIVES

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @03:18PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @03:18PM (#300630)

      TECO LIVES

      Ever used it? How about recently?

      I did, back in the early 1980s. It was pretty cool. You can still find the source code on the innertubes, but I've never tried it recently. Wonder if it would still be any fun.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 08 2016, @02:16PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 08 2016, @02:16PM (#300593)

    Mostly when I use vi to fix a simple config file I'm really unhappy because I have no smartparens so I'll F up parenthesis like this -> ), no yasnippet to speed me up, no mode based cursor movement commands for this weird format so its back to arrow keys 1000 times, no aggressive-indent mode to force my will upon the tab stops so I have to fix those manually, no flycheck to catch my syntax or other errors, even just simple stuff like no C-x-2 for split screen. Then when it explodes into some horrific tar baby of a problem touching 50 source code files all in totally inappropriate ways, I swear about my lack of projectile/perspective mode and when I'm done where is magit, which is a better git client than the CLI. Suddenly something that was going to take 15 seconds in vim has exploded into taking three hours in vim or it could have been two hours in emacs but now I'm neck deep in hungry alligators and I can't drop it all and start back up from the beginning in emacs.

    Mostly when I use emacs to make a source change, I spend like ten minutes getting ready. So I get sshfs on my local box talking to the distant fast huge dev box. Then start up emacs, m-x package-list-packages and upgrade anything new, restart emacs, spawn off a new perspective because I'm probably working multiple projects today, access the source files and get projectile talking to the repo. Then I look at the source for awhile and realize my "big change" is just altering the capitalization of some TPS report headers, you know, like the memo said I needed to do. Finally I get pissed off that I prepared, armed, and fired my howitzer to swat a mosquito and I could have been done fifteen minutes ago if I just SSH'ed into the dev box and ran vi remotely and changed the one line of header in the report, it wouldda been like 30 seconds of actual work.

    I would guess most of the time I'm pretty happy, but the unhappy times with both editors are highly memorable.

  • (Score: 1) by Mike on Monday February 08 2016, @04:56PM

    by Mike (823) on Monday February 08 2016, @04:56PM (#300710)

    They were both developed in 1976 (http://www.linfo.org/vi/history.html http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsHistory). [emacswiki.org] That makes them 40 years old. They are not eligible for social security! and I am not old! *Cough*, I mean, get off my lawn :)

    Oh, and vi for anything quick and dirty, but for anything serious, like reading email, emacs all the way.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @06:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @06:07PM (#300770)

      but for anything serious, like reading email, emacs all the way.

      This! This is what I mean when I say emacs is like systemd. How is an editor that reads e-mail even remotely in line with UNIX philosophy?

      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday February 08 2016, @08:49PM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Monday February 08 2016, @08:49PM (#300893)

        Because emacs dates from when Unix was first getting big. Makes about as much sense as complaining that Microsoft* Office 1.0 wasn't widely supported by the industry.

        *or whoever they bought it from

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 1) by Mike on Monday February 08 2016, @10:05PM

        by Mike (823) on Monday February 08 2016, @10:05PM (#300954)

        but for anything serious, like reading email, emacs all the way.

        This! This is what I mean when I say emacs is like systemd. How is an editor that reads e-mail even remotely in line with UNIX philosophy?

        I made the reading email comment flippantly, a play on the old, but correct, jokes about emacs greatly expanding on its original scope (I am actually insane enought to use gnus for email, which made the joke even funnier to me). Certainly, there is an argument to be made that emacs is an OS on top of an OS, and so is Systemd. On the other hand, if by installing emacs I was forced to use emacs for everything it was capable of, text editing, IDE, email reader, web browsing, etc, (I have this image of 'yum install emacs... erase firefox, vim, nano, chrome?) then I think the Systemd comparison would be far more valid.

        I would argue that at its heart emacs has a very UNIX philosophy. It is a basic text editor with modularity. The modularity allows people to add packages to it that in turn do different specific tasks. Pick the package for the task you want to do, or sometimes even pick a favorite from one of several packages available to do that task. Use a combination of different package together to get the job you want done (spell checking, email reading, MIME parsing package, email sending package, ...). This is very much the UNIX philosophy. Of course, taken to an extreme, every philosophy gets a little crazy.

        I'm straying a bit, but I wanted to comment on the ridiculousness of reading email in emacs. My initial reaction is/was amusement. But then I start to think about it (yeah, way too much). Email is analogous to writing letters. Is the main point of a letter organising your thoughts and communicating them in a understandable way or is it in writing the addresses correctly on the envelope? You definitely need both but which makes more sense: an envelope creation machine with a letter writing machine built in? (e.g. mail reader with a text editor built in); or a letter writing machine with an envelope creation machine built in?

  • (Score: 2) by srobert on Monday February 08 2016, @05:24PM

    by srobert (4803) on Monday February 08 2016, @05:24PM (#300737)

    Emacs comes with its own built in psychotherapist. From my experience with it, I can understand why that might be needed.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @05:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @05:50PM (#300754)

      C-x psycho-how-do-you-feel-about-that

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @08:51PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @08:51PM (#300896)

        *M-x doctor

  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday February 08 2016, @05:55PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Monday February 08 2016, @05:55PM (#300761) Homepage Journal

    Eight
    Megs
    And
    Constantly
    Swapping

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @06:16PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @06:16PM (#300774)

      If only eight megs was true...

              VIRT RES COMMAND
      810376 199960 emacs

  • (Score: 2) by tadas on Monday February 08 2016, @08:00PM

    by tadas (3635) on Monday February 08 2016, @08:00PM (#300845)

    After reading a dozen or two posts in this article, I'm reminded of the cover photo Dr. Dobbs once used on an issue devoted to editors: of a just-hatched baby chick following a doll.

    I started out in CP/M in the '80s. Wordstar, NewWord, then Qedit as a text editor. When I first started using Linux, there was Joe, that kept the old Wordstar key bindings. One of the first things I do on a Linux box is install Joe. For years, I kept saying I'd better learn vi, but I've gotten along without it for 25 years...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @08:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @08:26PM (#300866)

    The editor to rule them all!
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor) [wikipedia.org]

    I actually used that on my polytechnics education

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @10:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @10:42PM (#300993)

    You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is never get involved in a flamewar about vim/emacs, but only slightly LESS well known is this...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @03:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @03:14AM (#301137)

      >You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is never get involved in a flamewar about vim/emacs, but only slightly LESS well known is this...
      ...only point out "walled gardens" when "rooting" is on the line!!!!

      Ahh! Ha! Hah! ahahahahahahaha ATH++*NO CARRIER*

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday February 08 2016, @11:28PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday February 08 2016, @11:28PM (#301025)

    Sometimes I use one, sometimes the other. They're both great for certain tasks right out of the box, and both can be customized to be damn good at the things they aren't great at. My very slight preference is for vim when doing sysadmin-oriented tasks (because it's almost definitely available on strange servers I've never encountered before), and emacs when doing development-oriented tasks (because it has some really nice IDE features).

    It's not the editor that counts, it's what you write with it, and in nearly all cases your editor is going to allow you to move faster than your brain can.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:21AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:21AM (#301060) Homepage

    This is a topic I'm invested in since I believe tools are important, so buckle up.

    Let's get some things out of the way first. You should learn to use all of the mentioned editors to some degree or another. That knowledge will be useful. There will be times when vi is the only editor available. There will be times when ed is the only editor available. There will be times when the program you are using uses Emacs keybindings (most GNU programs via readline, for starters).

    My "qualifications": I started using Vim for many years, built up a massive configuration. I tried Emacs many times over those years. Now, I have used Emacs with Spacemacs for a year and plan to stay. I still use Vim for editing config files when I'm in a terminal. I have contributed to Spacemacs and Vim plugins, so I have knowledge of extending both editors. I also have experience with ed, vi, nano, sam, and acme.

    Next, let's talk about text editors and development environments. If all you are doing is really editing text (config files, say), then a simple text editor will suffice. Grab vi. If, however, you are programming, you really want a development environment. The classic UNIX environment includes not only vi, but also sh, make, cut, paste, nl, wc, sed, awk, perl, and more. All of these tools are used together for development. Therefore, trying to narrow the question down to "vi vs emacs" is narrow-sighted.

    Okay, now let's go through the editors and talk about how the work both as text editors and part of a larger development environment. First, we start with the vi family. vi is small and simple. It presents an efficient user interface for editing text. It's "modal" interface is often criticized for being obtuse but in fact it is an ingenious design. You can perform text editing operation in a small number of keystrokes. However, as a part of the DE (development environment), it doesn't integrate well. It can only use classic UNIX methods for integration. That means it can interact with the other UNIX tools like sed via files, or via pipes. vi can pipe text to and from other processes, but it can only do so by lines, not arbitrarily by characters. This is problematic as some syntaxes cannot be expressed cleanly when split into lines. Vim improves upon vi, adds lots of good features, adds scripting via VimScript (and others). So far, so good.

    Now, let's talk about Vim's critical design flaws and Neovim. First, Vim's source code is ugly. This discourages improvements. Second, Vim is primarily extended through C code. Yes, Vim has a scripting language, but Vim fundamentally comes from an "add more features to the binary" world view. Consider vimgrep: built into the binary. Spell checking? Compiled in. Line numbers? Compiled in. Syntax highlighting? Compiled in. Why is this a problem? It means these features fundamentally cannot be changed without editing the source code (see previous point) and recompiling. Third, VimScript is ugly, making extending Vim a chore. The "bindings" for Python et al are also ugly, so don't think you get a free pass by using another scripting language. Fourth, Vim doesn't have asynchronous subprocess support. This means that integrating with the larger *NIX environment is slow. This page elaborates: http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-vim/ [greer.fm]

    Neovim improves on most of these. Source code cleanup, native Lua scripting. async subprocesses. In fact, Neovim is an Emacs-ification of Vim. However, there's still the "implemented in C" roadblock.

    Now, let's talk about the Emacs family. There's only really one editor here that I'll talk about, GNU/Emacs. Let's talk about Emacs's flaws first. Bad keybindings, lots of chords, horrible out of the box configuration, lots of "useless" packages that come with the default distribution.

    Now, Emacs's strength is its fundamentally solid design. It has a small Emacs Lisp interpreter core, and everything else is implemented in Emacs Lisp. That means all behavior, from the command set to the key bindings to the syntax highlighting engine, can be customized. To note, its user interface can be changed to perfectly emulate Vim (up to and including emulating VimScript). Emacs also supports async subprocesses support. Ultimately, this makes Emacs a kind of text editing and development glue, much like Perl. It can call on other programs in the *NIX environment freely, then integrate them internally using Emacs Lisp. Emacs Lisp functions can be bound to keys for interactive use. It's like an interactive version of Perl, if you will.

    Okay, what is Spacemacs? Spacemacs is a packaged configuration for Emacs that gives it much improved out of the box behavior. That's all. By default, it provides very good Vim emulation via the Evil package.

    About Emacs's design: I suggest reading the following: https://www.finseth.com/craft/ [finseth.com] It goes over what exactly it takes to create a text editor and may explain why a text editor's design will naturally converge onto Emacs's design: more and more functionality implemented via a native scripting language.