emacs is decent once i install the lisp implementation of vi
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Anonymous2006-01-09 1:21
Microsoft Word.
Seriously.
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Anonymous2006-01-09 3:11
vim
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Anonymous2006-01-09 7:31
[insert religious war side-taking/troll encouragement here]
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Anonymous2006-01-09 9:25
nvi
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Anonymous2006-01-09 9:33
emacs if fat and ugly
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Anonymous2006-01-09 10:20
Emacs-ing Mother Fuckers Are Cock Suckers
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Anonymous2006-01-09 17:53
fuk you guys are nerds
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Anonymous2006-01-09 21:52
Emacs is cool, too bad its learning curve is a brick wall covered with spikes. Vim ftw!
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Anonymous2006-01-09 22:39
pico is superior.
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Anonymous2006-01-10 4:14
echo is superior.
serves you right for getting your code wrong
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Anonymous2006-01-10 5:18
is it just me or does anyone else hate when emacs screens down/up instead of moving line by line? (noting that of course pgup and pgdown should move up and down by screens)
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Anonymous2006-01-10 6:35
Ahh, the emacs operating system.
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Anonymous2006-01-10 6:36
I only wanted an editor...
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Anonymous2006-01-10 6:45
emacs and vim are both sodding old editors with fugly interfaces. To edit on Linux, I use Kate. If only it was faster. To edit on Windows, I use UltraEdit, which is my favourite editor.
Does anybody know of decent (decent as in not 30 years old, example of decent is Kate) console editors for either Linux (console) or Windows (Win32 console)? I ran out of them, I haven't seen any decent one for Linux and the text-mode ones for Windows are old 16 bit editors (not Win32).
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Anonymous2006-01-10 6:52
>>16
nano works fine for me on Linux. Nice and lightweight.
I set KDE up so that it uses gvim instead of the usual kate editor widget. :D
I think many people fail to realise the power of such "old" editors - they probably do much more than you think they do.
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Anonymous2006-01-11 1:45
Whether or not the old editors are powerful, they take a very long time to learn, and are possibly unmasterable for most people. Browsability and intuitiveness in an interface is something that both vi and emacs, even in their most modern incarnations, don't really have much of. (emacs is slightly better in this sense because it defaults to be non-modal; easier to understand than vi's smorgasboard of one-letter functionality) They were very good for their era, but today training time is a very important factor and they are deficent in that area.
I use the Python IDE, Idle, as a general-purpose text editor sometimes. That or nano.
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Anonymous2006-01-11 2:34
I like nedit.
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Anonymous2006-01-11 3:07
>>20
A craftsman is expected to know his tools. If you want power, learn how to use an editor. Easy to figure out != easy to use.
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Anonymous2006-01-11 3:55
vi is insanely complex but the good thing about it is that it keeps your programming skills sharp especially when dealing with regular expressions. become 1337 at search and replace haha. But it has this giant learning curve...
BTW-vim FTW
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Anonymous2006-01-11 4:59
>>19
And I think you may be failing to realize these editors are 20+ years into the past, and their power is also available in modern, decent interface editors. For example, Ultra Edit supports advanced column editing, regex seaerch and replace, macros, UTF-8 and UTF-16 conversion, incremental search, custom keys, various ways of handling tabs and indentation, bracket matching, multiple clipboards, multiple undo/redo, custom coloring, and more. The difference between UltraEdit and VIM is that the former is much, much easier and faster to learn (therefore more productive), and easier to learn how to do the advanced stuff. Besides, by using standard keys, you already know how to move and do all the basic operations.
BTW, question: does Nano support the standard keys for movement, selection and clipboard?
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Anonymous2006-01-11 5:13
>>24
Once again easy to learn != easy to use. Being able to do things in a few keystrokes is way easier and faster - and therefore more "productive" than clicking your way through menus as most modern editors seem to expect you to do.
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Anonymous2006-01-11 6:44
Using 20+ year old editors makes you cool. Sure, I could use BBEdit or "Ultra edit" but thats just no fun. Pretty interfaces are for the weak.
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Anonymous2006-01-11 6:47
>>25
Uh, what are you talking about? Don't tell me you actually expect users to highlight a file with the mouse, waiting for it to scroll, then click "Edit", then "Copy"... Menus are there for the stuff you do less often and thus do not remember. In fact, that's why I'm so interested in (pseudo) standard keys in decent editors. In a decent editor, what I've just said is done with Ctrl+Home, Shift+Ctrl+End, Ctrl+C. What's good is this doesn't work in my riced emacs or shit; it works in any decent editor from Notepad to PSPad, from UltraEdit to BabelMap.
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Anonymous2006-01-11 6:55
>>27
That's great, you can copy and paste with the keyboard. You can even move from the start of a file to the end. What an awesome editor. IS THAT IT?
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Anonymous2006-01-11 8:03 (sage)
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
O SSAGE
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Anonymous2006-01-11 8:24
>>28
Why yes, that would be it. Add regex search & replace, color highlighting, line numbers and folding, and that covers it.
If I need to do anything more fancy I'll throw a 30-second hack together in perl or ruby rather than regurgitate some arcane commands I can barely remember that are also completely useless elsewhere. Commands that took months to master (did you get those months back in added productivity?).
The common case is just that: common. You're an idiot for wasting your time, and now expect we should too? Besides, what kind of programs are you writing where your precious shortcuts make any difference in productivity?
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Anonymous2006-01-11 9:00
>>30
You don't need to know all the vi/emacs commands to do what you said either: C-< C-<space> C-> M-w, in emacs, or 1GyG in vi. It should only take you about one day, and not months, to learn these basic commands in either editor.
Also, you can still write your perl or ruby scripts to do your more complex things, if you don't want to learn elisp.
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Anonymous2006-01-11 13:17
>>30 You're an idiot for wasting your time, and now expect we should too?
I would make the same accusation of you.
Besides, what kind of programs are you writing where your precious shortcuts make any difference in productivity?
Doesn't matter what I'm writing; if it involves spending a lot of time editing text I don't want to be wasting time doing things the long way round.
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Anonymous2006-01-11 20:44
I would make the same accusation of you.
Except I didn't waste my time. This was the learning curve for my editor of choice: five minutes.
I don't want to be wasting time doing things the long way round.
Seems to me that learning an arcane syntax that is completely useless anywhere else is the long way around. How much of that wasted time that you spent learning will you get back? How much time do you waste looking up references for that syntax when inevitably you've forgotten something? How long does it take you to think up that l33to one-line hax that does what you want? Why couldn't you just sanely delegate it to a scripting language instead?
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Anonymous2006-01-11 20:46
>>31
My first post in this thread was >>30. This is a general criticism of the emacs and vi mentality.
BTW, vi > emacs
It should only take you about one day, and not months, to learn these basic commands in either editor.
a) That's the basic part. People who brag about the power of their editors inevitably aren't using basic features.
b) That's still a day too long.
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Anonymous2006-01-12 6:37
an arcane syntax that is completely useless anywhere else
Where is this "anywhere else" you keep talking about? I spend the majority of my time editing stuff, whether it be code or config files. My editor is more important to me than my desktop.
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Anonymous2006-01-12 7:00
Exactly what I said. A scripting language is useful for more than just processing text; it's a transferrable skill. Emacs and vi commands? Well...
Emacs is at least somewhat sane here, being built on an extensible lisp engine, but vi is pure bollocks.
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Anonymous2006-02-19 6:31
I write the code straight into the harddrive sectors with dd.
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Anonymous2006-02-19 6:45
edlin FTW
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Anonymous2006-02-19 21:13
emacs ftw
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Anonymous2006-02-19 21:36
I use GUI editors, which are all fundamentally better than the CLI. Failing that, I use nano because I can't remember all those crazy key commands and it shows them at the bottom.
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Anonymous2006-02-19 23:10
vim
:wq
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Anonymous2006-02-20 10:44
Emacs Made All Creationists Stupid...
Not that they were the brightest sorta tool in the shed before they all went wacko spacko.
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Anonymous2006-02-20 11:59
Escape Meta Alt Control Shift
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Anonymous2006-02-20 13:03
Vim sucks. Ass. And fat ones at that. So I tried emacs, and it was like a tarp. It starts out good, as in "less ancient and fugly". Then I move around and use it to fix some code, and discover emacs outdoes Office implementing Artificial Stupidity™, the technique of doing exactly what you do not want to do out of all the possible outcomes of your action. Finally I try to use more advanced features and discover they are all made of ass and poo. So I press Ctrl+M Alt+Q X J Shift+X oh wai-
So I go to another terminal and kill the stupid process.
So if we're to compare emacs or Vim, I'll take Vim, but that's like saying, I'll take bird shit over cow shit.
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Anonymous2006-02-20 17:24
I used nano frequently and disliked vim very much until one day I was forced to use vim (no other editor installed on the system). So I ran vimtutor and within .. I dunno .. half an hour I knew all the basic stuff. Simple editing (till that day simple editing in vim was a mystery for me), replacing of characters, words, lines, blocks, regular expressions, etc.
No months of learning and I do remember the commands. If you need so long I cant say else then you are an idiot.
Now I love vim. For big things I use Bluefish and for building Swing UIs in Java I use Netbeans but vim is perfect for small to medium scripts and conf files.
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Anonymous2006-02-20 17:31 (sage)
half an hour I knew all the basic stuff.
*snicker*
How basic is that?
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Anonymous2006-02-20 21:10
While I normally just ssh into my CS account and use terminal emacs, could anyone recommend a good build of it for windows?
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Anonymous2006-02-21 3:15
>>47
Well xemacs is available for winders. Not sure aboot proper emacs, although you could probably get it to build either with mingw or cygwin if you really wanted.
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Anonymous2006-02-21 3:17
>>45
I tried netbeans and found it unusable. It would take a 5 minute break for garbage collection every 5 minutes.
Nevermind getting it to build, I believe its available in cygwin.
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Anonymous2006-02-23 15:26
In reply to the opinion that Vi and Emacs keybindings do not transfer:
1) Vi movement is the main method of movement in most roguelike games.
2) The Emacs way of pressing one C-X combination and then another key is used in many places, GNU Screen is the one I use the most, you only use one accelerator though.
Emacs hurts my fingers, I don't want to use modifiers that much; Toggling between modes in Vim is easy if you map Escape to Caps Lock, or use the... ^o for single commands.
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Anonymous2006-02-24 3:33
I'm a Vim user, but I wanna learn emacs because I like to hack Lisp but it's a PITA editing Lisp source in Vim then switching to your Lisp interpreter, reloading the file etc when I could just run it in SLIME.
Good news is there is a Vim mode for emacs so I can use it without ruining my wrists.
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Anonymous2006-02-24 11:01
Textmate > Kate > Notepad.exe > Vim > Emacs
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Anonymous2006-02-24 11:21
>>56
I do not see how you could consider Notepad superior to Vim?
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Anonymous2006-02-24 11:50
>>57
He put Textmate at the top of the pile, that makes him an iFag, don't pay any attention to him.
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Anonymous2006-02-24 12:01
>>58
I respect homosexuals, I do not think we should dismiss >>56's opinion just because he happens to be born with inferior genes.
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Anonymous2006-02-24 12:44 (sage)
DEEP ARGUMENTATION
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Anonymous2006-02-24 12:46
I do not see how you could consider Notepad superior to Vim?
1. Not a refurbished 70's freeware
2. Does not require a terminal emulator, can run into the normal GUI
3. Doesn't require 20 hours of learning before its power becomes self-evident
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Anonymous2006-02-24 13:01
Not a refurbished 70's freeware
Free Software != freeware
Does not require a terminal emulator, can run into the normal GUI
GVim, dumbass.
Doesn't require 20 hours of learning before its power becomes self-evident
Yeah with notepad what you see is what you get. Which aint much. At all.
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Anonymous2006-02-24 13:51
Free Software != freeware
Sure, whatever word RMS wants you to use
GVim, dumbass.
Question was "I do not see how you could consider Notepad superior to Vim?", not "I do not see how you could consider Notepad superior to Vim or whatever faggotery somebody put on top of it to make it look like something else than an unproductive nerd toy"
Yeah with notepad what you see is what you get. Which aint much. At all.
You don't get it. Pretty much anything would be better than vim. Of course notepad.exe is quite shitty and useless for any real work. Emacs and Vim are just more useless, those relics of the pasts are only used by UNIX nerds who are proud they don't run X on their 'boxen' because they are too hardcore to need a GUI.
The rest of the world moved away from those user-hostile pieces of crap, and use powerful editors that know how to manage complexity (Kate, Textmate, BBEdit). When you actually need to do heavy text lifting, you use perl/python/ruby, not your editor, it's much faster. (Or you just pipe stuff through sed and awk if you are into retrocomputing)
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Anonymous2006-02-24 16:11
Not a refurbished 70's freeware
Vim is a copy of the originally non-Free software Vi.
whatever faggotery somebody put on top of it
GVim is what is used in a GUI environment. And I can't run Notepad on a terminal, so that sucks.
user-hostile pieces of crap
Tried Cream [1]? I sure haven't.
The rest of the world moved away from those user-hostile pieces of crap... When you actually need to do heavy text lifting, you use perl/python/ruby
Amen to that.
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Anonymous2006-02-25 2:14 (sage)
The rest of the world moved away from those user-hostile pieces of crap, and use powerful editors that know how to manage complexity (Kate, Textmate, BBEdit).
i can't run any of those on my router...
i can't run any of those on my router...
Why the fuck would you want to run a text editor on your router? You can network your router's file system in such a way that you can open them in editors built with the 21st century in mind.
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Anonymous2006-02-25 7:08
>>68
Sounds like overkill. In this case I'd say vi is a good idea.
But anyone who always insists on using vi, just because they sometimes use it over remote connections, is a fucking tool. Your local box is local; use an editor that isn't full of shit and fail.
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Anonymous2006-02-25 7:12
Sounds like overkill. In this case I'd say vi is a good idea.
Why vi instead of pico or nano, then? Because "Vi is available everywhere" yet pico and nano aren't?
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Anonymous2006-02-25 7:38
>>70
There's that, yes. Also, vi is a fully featured editor while pico is just a curses-ified cat.
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Anonymous2006-02-25 7:51
vi is a fully featured editor while pico is just a curses-ified cat.
When I actually have to remotely login somewhere and cannot find a decent text editor, last fucking thing I want is to learn about the stupid shit vi does. You just need to learn i, escape-ZZ and :q! if you ever need to us vi, but you never do. Fucking grow up, UNIX nerds, your toy is not useful and is not cool.
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Anonymous2006-02-25 7:56
The rest of the world moved away from those user-hostile pieces of crap... When you actually need to do heavy text lifting, you use perl/python/ruby
What editor would you write the code in ;)? Noo, not on the commandline, that is not reusable.
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Anonymous2006-02-25 7:59
What editor would you write the code in ;)? Noo, not on the commandline, that is not reusable.
People answered before.
Kate, Textmate, Ultraedit.
vi key bindings are much more efficient when you measure wrist-miles, or, how much movement your wrist has to take over the course of a day. i'd love editors like subethaedit or textmate if they supported vi key bindings ... why don't they? lame.
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Anonymous2006-03-15 1:25
wrist-miles
You want wrist miles? How about vi gets rid of that faggot dual mode first?
Oh, wait, what am I saying? Constantly changing mode saves strokes. Now pass me the coolaid.
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Anonymous2006-03-15 3:35
>>90
This is why emacs and vi both are gay as hell. Real editors take advantage of modern principles of interface design and have real menus that don't require meta-alt-penis-foodprocessor to use.
* > {vi||emacs}
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Anonymous2006-03-15 3:38
>>91
Ah menus. Because I love taking my hands of the keyboard to aim the mouse pointer at a small area of the screen.
Can be disabled. (Although then you lose most of the good things of vim)
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Anonymous2006-03-15 6:21
>>94
>Ah menus. Because I love taking my hands of the keyboard to aim the mouse pointer at a small area of the screen.
As if playing keyboard-twister with your fingers is really any more effiecent (PROTIP: it's not). As someone else pointed out, if you really have a problem with mice (and in 2006, that really IS a problem, but whatever, Mr CLI) there's always keyboard shortcuts (which are almost *always* more terse and effiecent then their retarded emacs counter parts).
Long story short; people who use emacs or vi are really fucking stupid, just FYI.
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Anonymous2006-03-15 6:25
if you really have a problem with mice (and in 2006, that really IS a problem, but whatever, Mr CLI
I have no problem with my mouse, I just don't want to have to reach for one when I'm trying to type.
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Anonymous2006-03-15 6:30
again, a non-issue; both offer key bindings; but emacs' bindings are made of crude hax and fail.
Name:
Anonymous2006-03-15 6:43
Yes, fine, emacs is a crude hack, it must be true because Anonymous said so. gb2/notepad.
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Anonymous2006-03-15 6:53
emacs is made of lose and fail
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Anonymous2006-03-15 7:37
>>99
Vim has 11 modes. One of them is the ^o mode which allows you to enter a command and then return to insert mode.
1. The normal mode, where you can enter commands with :, move around with hjkl and do whatever.
2. Visual mode, activated with v in normal mode, allows selection of text and then running commands on the selections.
3. Select mode... I don't really know, I guess that's what you get when you select with the mouse.
4. Insert mode, for writing text.
5. Command-line mode, I think this is the ^o mode.
6. Ex mode, like ed.
1. open Emacs
2. activate the supposedly Vim-like mode of Emacs, with Alt-X viper-mode
3. try to use v, V, ^V, gq, or really any remotely useful Vim feature
4. go back to Vim
Erm. If you want a single mode editor why use vim? The power is in the dual modes.
but omg it has customisable toolbars. what a chunk of shit.
Name:
Anonymous2006-03-17 12:22
>>113
You call that power? As in, the power is in faster wheelchairs? The power is in not needing them bub.
Name:
Anonymous2006-03-17 13:12
>>113
GVim for the lose, I have all the toolbars, scrollbars and crap configured away so it looks like its twin brother Vim.
>>114
waht; normal editors suck because they suck; it's like comparing binary packages to compiling yourself. The compiled package will always be faster, no matter what you do. I really wonder how binary packages are created, I think they somehow excavate them from swamps and stuff.
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Anonymous2006-03-17 13:30
>>115
waste your time compiling shit that won't work half the time, gentoo loser.
most of us have actual *things* to do, you know? like learning all the hidden features of our editor :)
What the fuck are you using, a trash eighty? I have an ancient (k6-2, 500mhz) computer and it takes *maybe* 20 seconds or so for abiword to load.
The only thing that takes *Minutes* is emacs!
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Anonymous2006-03-17 17:59
>>121
My highly optimized emacs starts in 0 seconds on my PII 333MHz. No, I don't use emacs, but it compiles faster than Vim, so I tried it out for a couple milliseconds.
The flag, it does nothing!! I think. Better go file some Gentoo bugs.
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Anonymous2006-03-22 9:54
Any idea where can I download the emacs version of the new nVidia drivers optimized for Oblivion?
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Anonymous2006-03-22 11:33
/dev/hda1 4.5G 3.2G 1.1G 75% /
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Anonymous2006-03-22 11:43
>>135
I hope hda1 isn't your /boot partition. If so it's way too big and you're storing way too much crap on it. If not, why the hell don't you have a /boot partition?
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Anonymous2006-03-22 14:23
>>136 No point; if the hard drive goes it it doesn't matter wether you have 1 partition or 1,000,000. And what are you going to do with just /boot and / while /usr fscks? Wank off?
>>141
Uh, why? Not that I'm a Lunix or GNAA fanboy, in fact I'm more of a Windows NT user, and while my knowledge of ReiserFS internals is null, I've heard it's awesome.
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Anonymous2006-03-24 8:35
>>142
In every way imaginable (not version 4, it is just slow).
vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim
Admin: "Well, there's nano and emacs, nano joe and emacs, nano and vim, nano emacs and vim, nano emacs joe and vim, vim emacs joe and vim, vim nano vim vim joe and vim, vim joe vim vim emacs vim mcedit and vim..."
Cow-orkers: "Vim vim vim vim..."
Admin: "vim vim vim nano and vim, vim vim vim vim vim vim kedit vim vim vim..."
Cow-orkers: "Vim! Lovely vim! Wonderful vim!"
Admin: "or TextWrangler, BBEdit with a TextEdit window in a Xcode IDE with syntax highlighting and code completion, with a localized nano in Terminal.app and vim."
Anonymous: "Have you got anything without vim?"
I don't get why people say vim is hard to learn. It's really not that hard. It's just the multi-modality that people don't expect. Once you understand there's 2 modes that you switch between, you can get a handle on most of the basic commands in like 5 minutes.
The thing that makes emacs and vim superior to most other editors for me is that they can parse compiler output and lets you navigate through the errors and warnings easily. You usually don't get that without having a full-blown IDE.
Oh yeah, also, you get to keep your fingers on the home row. Who the fuck wants to move their hand back and forth between home row, arrow/home/insert/delete/pgup/pgdown keys, and the mouse anyway? How annoying is that?
Name:
Anonymous2006-04-01 22:39
Once you understand there's 2 modes that you switch between,
Oooh, hard. Oh, wait, it isn't.
you can get a handle on most of the basic commands in like 5 minutes.
How basic is "basic"? Arrow keys, delete letter, delete word, replace, insert, append, start/end line, search? That's about right, I'd say. The question is how much you'll remember tomorrow.
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Anonymous2006-04-02 15:59
VI, easy to learn? I've been using it for years and no, it's not "easy"; after all this time, I still don't know how to cut and paste in it.
Emacs and VI are made of lose and fail for -among many, many other things- using bizarre and obscure means to do things that are simple in other editors (eg, search and replace, cut and paste).
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Anonymous2006-04-02 16:15
>>172
copypasta: y for copy, d for cut, p for paste, v for visual mode for fine selection, pasting is a skill
Name:
Anonymous2006-04-02 16:21
after all this time, I still don't know how to cut and paste in it.
Then you haven't even glanced at the manual.
Name:
Anonymous2006-04-02 17:43
>>173
In notepad (and most modern editors)
ctrl-arrow for word selection; edit->copy (to copy), edit->cut (to cut), edit->paste to paste. You can also do the whole ^c^v bit too, of course.
But if you don't know about the ^c^v bit, you can simply look at the interface and say "ok, there's a menu called edit, wonder whats there? oh, that's how I cut and paste, ok". Whereas with vi you have to plummet the depths of some manual written in moon language somewhere.
>>174
I looked at it enough to see it is written in moon language.
Name:
Anonymous2006-04-02 18:03
>>175
GVim has optional menus, enabled by default for dummies. The first thing I do with a fresh GVim install is disable anything that smells of GUI.
Name:
Anonymous2006-04-02 19:43
GVim has the nastiest GUI that ever graced this planet.
Honestly, as much as I dislike vim, I think they should lose the GUI anyway and stick with CLI. The GUI is fugly.
>>175
So what exactly are you saying? You've been using an editor for years, even though you never figured out how to cut and paste? Man, I hope nobody is paying you for this.
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Anonymous2006-04-03 0:58
>>179
It's (obviously) not my primary editor, I learned just enough to use it as it's primarily advocated for: Unix systems in single-user mode (where it's the only thing you have, and usually you only need to replace a word or two).
For real editing; I use a modern editor; fuck this zOMG I'M GONNA GEEK LIKE IT'S 1979!!!1 shit.
Name:
Anonymous2006-04-03 2:28
Why does everyone think that people would only want to use Vi or Emacs because they want to pretend to be leet? I think that once you learn one of these, they really are easier to use.
The trend in modern editors of involving the mouse in more and more aspects of user input is ridiculous. If you think about it, the mouse is only really useful when the input domain involves some kind of pseudo-continuous (x,y) coordinate system. For example, drawing (manipulation of pixels in a matrix) and text-selection (highlighting characters arranged in terms of row, column) really benefit from mouse input. However, things like menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes are just made up excuses to use the mouse. These are all just hacks that map a set of discrete input options onto regions of a coordinate plane. While the objects themselves may be called intuitive (as in they are analogous to real world forms of input, such as push buttons), employing them for input is completely counter-intuitive, as it is a very round-about way of doing things.
Name:
Anonymous2006-04-03 5:37
I think that once you learn one of these, they really are easier to use.
I'm one of the guys who learned vi. Quite well, actually. And while it's exceptional in a few circumstances, overall I'd say it sucks pretty awful. Simply put, modal editing should rot in hell. We're not using 300 baud modems anymore, guys.
I'm not adept at emacs so this is more tenuous, but I believe it's the opposite extreme: it has one mode (great!), but way too many key combinations.
No, you don't need GUI to make a decent text editor. Having two modes, or several hundred key combinations is not the way to go though.
Name:
Anonymous2006-04-03 6:19
>>170
Yes, it's hard, because you don't have menus for the less frequent tasks you don't remember what goddamned commands and keys did they use; because the online help sucks grossly; because it doesn't have anything in common with other editors you may already know; because configuring it is just insane; because the several modes and how everything is done is absolutely insane and illogical; and several other reasons I'm surely missing right now. Oh and HJKL is more Unix retardedness. Why not WSAD, like all rational beings would use?
>>171
You even need a command to join lines. Talk about useless editors. I don't want to work for the editor, I want the editor to work for me.
>>174
One shouldn't need a manual to use a text editor. The interface should be self-explanatory and should show you the hotkeys so that you'll learn them with use; keys should be logical enough to be figured out once you know a bit; advanced features should have a quick cheat sheet and should be trivial to figure out. Editors like PSPad or UltraEdit can do almost as much as what vim does plus other things vim doesn't, and they never require you to read anything, just play around and in 5 minutes you'll be doing what vim hackers with years of experience manage to do with vim and fap to as a great accomplishment.
>>178
Not denying that; but vim and emacs should share the place.
>>180
Use mcedit for goodness sake, it's nearly decent.
>>181
I use modern editors that don't suck and I never even touch the mouse. Mouse is slow. I work fast. If I need to use menus for something I rarely use, I consider the keyboard first.
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Anonymous2006-04-04 4:41
>>183
Easy to figure out != easy to use. Perhaps you would advocate replacing a keyboard with a picture of the alphabet, allowing people to click on the appropriate button with the mouse to input the letter of their choice. So much easier than having to learn that elitist QWERTY nonsense amirite?
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Anonymous2006-04-04 5:49
>>184
That's where you're wrong, usually the things that make the 1970s editors hard to use are things which also make them hard to figure out.
Again, as >>183 excellently put it; the computer works for you, not you for it. If you have to read a manual to figure out how to do basic functions (cut and paste) then the editor FAILS.
We're not talking about advanced functions here; we're talking about cut and fucking paste.
Again, it all has nothing to do with mice; it has to do with the way in wich information is presented to the user. With a decent editor the user has to spend a very minimal amount of time figuring out what he needs to do to do the tasks he started the thing up for.
Again, VI and Emacs are pure, unadulturated Geek Wank. They serve no other purpose in this day and age than to display HOW FUCKING HARDCORE I AM LOL. Want something lightweight to throw on to a boot disk? there's nano or mcedit. Want something more powerful that you can use as an IDE? get UltraEdit. Want word processing? Get a word processor.
There is nothing which either emacs or vi is good at which is not done *better* by more modern editors with far better UIs (often CLI ones, at that) which don't require 500 hours in the manual or give you carpal-tunnel syndrome trying to save a file and quit (I'm looking at you, emacs).
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Anonymous2006-04-04 5:56
>>185
Don't forget: Want to do some seriously wierd shit to your text? Use a scripting language!
It amazes me that people come up with bloody arcane sequences that would be easier to throw together in a real language. Of course, 99.9% of the time, you won't need to resort to this. Why waste time?
So, you're saying there are editors better than Vim?
Recommend me one for Linux that is as good as Vim at every task and I will try it out. After 3 seconds I will post back here saying how much it sucks.
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Anonymous2006-04-04 6:16
>>185
I've never tried UltraEdit, but I know it's not free, it's not available on anything except windows, and even on windows, very few people have even heard of it (nobody I know).
On the other hand, vim and emacs are practically on every installation of *nix, they are free and they are more powerful than any other editor in *nix. I agree that some of their aspects could use updating, but this doesn't illegitimize their use.
So for people who use *nix, yes, there is a purpose for vim and emacs other than, how did you put it, Geek Wank? Believe it or not, there are many real companies that consist of 90% emacs or 90% vim users.
Maybe the people you see everyday are idiots, but there are people who use emacs or vim just because it's the best they have to work with, not because they want to show off. Why is that so hard for you to accept?
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Anonymous2006-04-04 6:41
Menus aren't terribly useful if your editor is very powerful and offers hundreds of functions. It's even worse if your editor is extendible; if the user defines a new function, where do you put it in the menu system?
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Anonymous2006-04-04 7:43
>>188
UltraEdit is fairly popular in Windows, but PSPad is free and it's about as good (even better when it comes to macros - fully scriptable in the language of your choice - JS/Python/Perl/VB/...).
As for Unix editors, mcedit is better than vim and emacs, that's not saying much, but it is. It's open sauce, available on all unices worth using, and character mode.
>>189
Uh, that's *exactly* when menus are useful: if your editor has 1000 features, you don't want to learn escape gee sixty four slash colon for every one, you learn the ones you use 99.9% of the time, and arrange the rest in a menu you can quickly navigate.
Good extensible editors let you edit your menus or create shortcut keys for your macros very easily...
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Anonymous2006-04-04 7:48
>>190
How the crap do you navigate through menus containing 1000 features? Fuck that shit.
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Anonymous2006-04-04 10:05 (sage)
>>190
If mc means Midnight Commander, I'm not even going to try it out.
Alright I am now...
Bad things:
* Mouse support.
* Single mode.
* Can't figure out how to open a file.
* Can't figure out how to delete other than del or bs.
* Pops up some retarded dialog when I press esc, containing an option called "Cancel quit"... (Hm? I want to cancel my current action and quit? OK.)
* Can't quit without that dialog, use C-c... same... HELP!! Switch to another terminal and kill the process.
* Didn't clean up the terminal when I killed it. Run reset.
* Open a Ruby file. Almost unreadable due to the blue background with syntax highlighting. Can't figure out how I accidentally opened the menu, so I can't change the background color. Alright, I used the mouse, LOL! Didn't find anything color-related.
* Add a method... no smart indenting. OK, figured out how to open a file... use the mouse LOL! Yet another stupid popup. No tab-completion in the open file dialog...
* Long lines not wrapped in display...
* Replace dialog has too many fields and buttons.
OK, I give up, back up Vim :p
I'm not saying Vim is perfect though, it's Ruby indentation could be improved a bit, and I'm too lazy to fix it. The colors are a bit dim sometimes too, but that's due to my terminal emulator. PuTTY works great... hm, I think I changed dark blue to a lighter shade there >_< Can't figure out how do the same in Konsole, I should switch to some real terminal like rxvt, but I like the S-Arrow session switching, sure beats the ^A^A of GNU Screen... hm, I could map it, and I think I will... although Konsole will probably get the input first :X
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Anonymous2006-04-04 10:23
>>191
How the crap do you read a 200 page manual and memorize shortcuts for 1000 features? Fuck that shit.
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Anonymous2006-04-04 10:38
>>193
You don't. Need a feature, search for it from within the editor. Least that's what you do with emacs. You don't bind a key to every single function, just the most commonly used ones. The rest you just call by typing them in to the minibuffer.
>>198
Faster than digging through menus trying to figure out what you need.
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Anonymous2006-04-04 18:28
>>199
Not really. Particularly when you consider the fact that you'd have to do run apropos for even the most basic of editing commands.
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Anonymous2006-04-04 18:36 (sage)
>>200
JUST USE THE BUILT IN HELP FUNCTION IN ANY REAL EDITOR (Vim) OK
Sure, you might have to read some to actually know how to use the help.
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Anonymous2006-04-04 19:07
>>201
Again, for *basic functionality* that's far more work than I should have to do in a modern editor.
You people keep missing the point, let me put it in caps so that maybe you'll get it finally. THE COMPUTER WORKS **FOR YOU**, **YOU** SHOULD NOT HAVE TO WORK **FOR THE COMPUTER**!
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Anonymous2006-04-04 19:14 (sage)
>>202
Vim works for me with minimal effort, much better than taking it up the ass by the worthlessness of most other editors.
What makes is superior is the clean interface (almost like ed), the intuitive (when you become one with the universe) key assignments, the relative low rate of key spamming (you don't have to combine keys too often, which is good), language support, lots of features (but importantly, not too many), a large plugin repository, normal mode (almost as good as ed), man, ed sure is the best editor ever.
Too bad I like syntax highlighting, otherwise I'd use ed all the time.
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Anonymous2006-04-04 20:50
What makes it inferior, HUH?
Multi-modal, you dumb shit.
the intuitive (when you become one with the universe) key assignments
You're killing me here...
relative low rate of key spamming (you don't have to combine keys too often, which is good),
Yeah, you just have to change mode all the time. No spamming there...
lots of features (but importantly, not too many)
For vim? You're on crack.
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Anonymous2006-04-05 3:49
People go on an on about how multi-modal interfaces are a Bad Thing. The thing is, I have this key on my keyboard labelled caps lock. When I press it, I CAN TYPE IN CAPS WITHOUT HAVING TO HOLD SHIFT DOWN. WHEN I PRESS IT AGAIN I can type normally again. So I guess if you thing holding down shift is cruise control for cool, then multiple modes aren't suitable for you.
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Anonymous2006-04-05 6:19
Notepad 4EVA
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Anonymous2006-04-05 6:48
>>201
vim's help is butt ugly and it's made of shit and fail
And no, I shouldn't need to read anything to start using it and to do anything simple to medium complexity.
>>205
What makes vim's interface inferior? It's lack thereof. It has almost no interface, so if you don't know the shortcut key or confusing and illogical command, you have to read a manual.
>>207
Flawed argument, because Caps Lock alters just character properties, not functionality.
>>210
emacs also requires you to read shit before doing *basic* functions, and therefore is made of shit and fail.
>>208
For a simple editor, Notepad is perfectly acceptable, and is preferable than some arcane bullocks from the 1970's when it comes to making simple changes to files (for the rest, you want an IDE or an honest to god word processor).
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Anonymous2006-04-05 17:07
>>202
When do you ever "work for a computer?" This isn't a 22nd century apocalytic robots-have-taken-over-the-world movie.
Of course the computer always works for you. You learning how to make the computer work for you doesn't entail you working for the computer.
Take your hey-look-I-constructed-a-sentence-in-which-the-two-clauses-are-inversions-of-each-other-it-must-be-true mentality and GTFO.
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Anonymous2006-04-05 18:39
>Of course the computer always works for you. You learning how to make the computer work for you doesn't entail you working for the computer.
It does when it entails throwing up unneeded complexity; and when it comes to unneeded complexity, VI and Emacs wrote the book (which is the same one I presume you want people to look in).
It is not always possible to present tasks in the simplest manner, however, when it is possible to do so, then a better program will present them in the simplest manner practical. This is the basis of good UI design.
However -being designed in an era before people gave much thought to decent UI or considerations such as end-users or carpal tunnel syndrome- both emacs and VI go far out into left field as how they approach even simple editing tasks.
Because they turn editing into a chore where discovering the poorly thought-out commands are a Rite Of Passage they create *unneeded* work for the end user. Simple tasks should be simple to do; but both editors not only add unneeded complexity, they hail that complexity _as a sign of superiority_!
In conclusion, as editors; they fail hard, and need to gb2/1979 when there really wasn't anything better.
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Anonymous2006-04-05 18:45
Simple things are simple to do in Vim, same with advanced tasks. As long as you know how. Figuring something out is a once-in-a-lifetime thing that will improve your productivity by up to 76% according to my study I just conducted with my erect penis.
Dumbing things down is not an option as it requires serious users to bend over and take it anally from the editor while they try to perform anything more complex than typing characters into a text file.
No, a scripting language for advanced tasks is not the solution (unless it's some task like building files and such). If you can do it in the editor, then do so.
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Anonymous2006-04-05 19:02
>Dumbing things down is not an option as it requires serious users to bend over and take it anally from the editor while they try to perform anything more complex than typing characters into a text file.
Your premise that everything is either *all stupid* or *all complex* fails. In modern editors you can save in one keystroke (^S), likewise for exiting (M-F4); with editors such as Ultraedit, KWrite you can also do more advanced tasks while still retaining that same simplicity.
Let's do a quick comparision:
Saving in vi:
<esc>:w (three characters)
Saving in emacs
Ctrl-X, Ctrl-W (four characters)
Saving in abiword, notepad, kedit, kwrite, etc
Ctrl-s (two characters)
Quitting in vi
<esc>:q (3 characters)
Quitting in emacs
Ctrl-X Ctrl-C (4 characters)
Quitting in most other, modern GUI editors
M-F4
While building on (as opposed to throwing away) that simplicity, modern word processing programs and IDEs also offer more complex functions, and any decent program will allow you to define you own keybindings or create macros for often-used tasks.
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Anonymous2006-04-05 19:09
Note: it's one more keystroke for vim since you have to press Enter after entering the command.
OH SHI-
That's the second thing I got wrong (I believe the traditional way to save in emacs is Ctrl-X, Ctrl-S, though I don't use it enough to be sure).
Of course, the fact that both vi and emacs require four keys to save detracts nothing from my point.
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Anonymous2006-04-05 19:30 (sage)
>>191
Logical tree structure. Never heard of HCI, or *gasp* how to design a usable webpage?
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Anonymous2006-04-05 21:46 (sage)
>>215 M-F4 works in GVim, and ^s is unmapped in all modes (^s is off-limits when talking to a terminal).
YAY! While looking for a shortcut for saving, I found ZQ, quit without saving! I had been looking for it and it was right below ZZ (write and quit) ... >_< I should add a mapping for ZA to :qa!.
Say I want to sort a list that is part of a file, in Vim, I'd just select the list with v (just found out there's V, for linewise selection, I'll be using it every day now :)), some movement commands (there is probably one to select until the next empty line, ah, }), and then %!sort to sort the list.
In any other editor... If I'm lucky I'll find a menu option, or even a pipe function (never seen one AFAIK), otherwise I will have to use an external tool... I think MS Word can sort selections :)
Oh well, that's just to show that everything is so easy in Vim even though it took me 300 hours in MS Paint at 4 AM to write this reply.
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Anonymous2006-04-06 4:57
>>219
YAY! I've found an illogical three key command for a simple task had to do with another illogical command of four keys before! I should alias ZJKASF to cut a line!
Don't you see this is all wankery? You make me think Gentoo ricers are sane.
As for sorting, UltraEdit, for example, has builtin sorting (bindable to any simple key combination you want), as well as pipes. PSPad probably does too. I don't know what } does in vim but if by any chance it selects blocks, most decent editors I've seen (including UE and PSPad)) does that.
>>220 as you can see from >>221, all emacs/vi freaks are either Gentoo Ricers, BSD burnouts or LFS nuts.
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Anonymous2006-04-06 9:42
>>222 has never experienced the embrace of a fine maiden.
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Anonymous2006-04-06 13:59
>>222 knew better than to rtfm and to waste his time on editors that need esc-:fgsfds or m-X^E^G-M-^del in order to make them go VROOM VROOM, and therefore was able to lose his virginity af the age when most ricers were learning what CFLAGS are.
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Anonymous2006-04-06 14:12
>>224
hahaha I'm gonna have to bind esc-:fgsfds to something really obscure.
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Anonymous2006-04-06 17:31
>>215
On the other hand, what about creating a structure like this, which I use a lot when I program:
void blah () {
| <---- have caret here to start entering code
}
In vim (assuming you've typed out the signature already)
{ <Enter> } <Esc> O <Tab>
In most other editors:
{ <Enter> } <Left> <Enter> <Up> <Tab>
Yes, it saves only one key, but remember that the second case also requires that you move your hand away from the home row over to the arrow keys, which is extra inconvenience. Now I had thought that the "insert-line" feature in UltraEdit (Ctrl-Enter) did this, but unfortunately it behaves like <End> <Enter> rather than <Home> <Enter>.
>>220
How do I pipe commands in UltraEdit? I can't find it in the menus, and searching for the word pipe in help doesn't bring up anything useful.
>>222
No, I'm not a "Ricer". And I agree with you that it's retarded to obssess over really obscure editor features. But I still find Vim easier to use than any gui-heavy editor I know of.
>>226
Fail. You actually press the same number of keys in your keyboard in vim, unless your keyboard has an uppercase O key. On top of that, the vim combination is fugly to learn, while the other way is just logic and common sense use of a modern editor. Finally, you can create macros or templates for that in modern editors, even have them generate the enclosing brace.
As for pipes in UE, you're right, I haven't found them either. You can run commands on active files but not pipe selections. You can create shortcuts to commands and do some more stuff with Tools configuration in the Advanced menu.
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Anonymous2006-04-06 18:13
>>226
With some indentation setting on you'll only need the {^M}^[O.
In this situation I'd consider using ^O instead of ^[ as well as it is probably faster than ^[ which is usually not remapped to capslock or ctrl.
Not an user of UltraEdit, but I'd assume Ctrl-Shift-Enter inserts a line above instead of under.
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Anonymous2006-04-06 18:40
>>228
Okay, I guess if you count modifiers too, you have a point. But still, you have to move over to the arrow keys. Someone mentioned a long time ago that vim and emacs gives you rsi. It's true for emacs, since you have to ctrl- everything, which is awkward, but I don't see how it's true for vim. In fact, from what I understand, the leading cause of certain types of RSI are repeated large motions like moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse, or to the arrow/home/end/pgup/pgdown keys.
Someone argued many posts ago that you should use a scripting language to do heavy text modification. In that case vim wins, because it's not apparent how you would filter a section of text through a script in something like UltraEdit (unless of course, you cut and paste the text into another document, run the filter, then cut and paste it back, but you don't need any convincing to see how bad that is), whereas in Vim, it's well integrated and very convenient.
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Anonymous2006-04-07 4:22
>>230
Agree on applying a command to text selections, first thing vim does well. I'll see if PSPad can do it. It probably can since you can script it; in the worst case I'd need to create a script to take the current selection and run it through a pipe to an external command asked to the user. I could script that in any of JavaScript, VBScript, Python, Perl, and probably more.
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Anonymous2006-04-07 13:10
Vim is better but you Emacs is written in Lisp, I'm confused :s
(add-character ( add
(l, 1)
)
)
Lisp indentation is a mystery.
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Anonymous2006-04-07 14:28
>>235
Ugh, that twat ESR uses shitty indentation too. Closing parens should never have a line to themselves. Opening parens can, and should be indented 2 spaces.