[Love Calm Quiet]

I explored the A T "Intro to OS X" article mentioned by MacNN and found a new one for me (on their page 4)...

"Mac OS X includes a basic set of installed applications as well. Most of those have equivalents in Windows and Linux. You have Mail for e-mail, Safari for web browsing, iTunes for music, and instead of Notepad, you have vi for text editing. (Actually, there’s an app called TextEdit for text editing, which can open Word documents and defaults to rich text format for saves.)"

"vi" for text editing? Have I been missing something for years?

[LaGow]

No, you haven't. Vi is a default Unix command-line text editor that is almost painful to use. I only use it to edit config files.

[saddino]

Originally posted by Love Calm Quiet:
"vi" for text editing? Have I been missing something for years?

Yes, a LOT of years. "vi" has been around since 1976. Bill Joy wrote it for BSD Unix to improve upon "ed" (or "ex") -- a line editor which, if you don't know, is as far from WYSIWYG as you can possibly imagine (I started writing C in "ex'). Many programmers fell in love with vi until emacs came along and split their allegience in two. To this day UNIX gurus argue over vi and emacs.

vi and emacs are installed with the BSD tools for OS X. Check them out in Terminal!

[Love Calm Quiet]

So Ars Tech thinks that a command line editor is what's comparable to Notepad?

I don't think an "almost painful to use" command line editor is what ought to be recommended to a new iMini user.

[saddino]

Ars tends to be on the tech side, so the author's inner programmer/geek came out in that line there.

[LaGow]

Originally posted by saddino:
Ars tends to be on the tech side, so the author's inner programmer/geek came out in that line there.

Well, there's an almost geeky thrill every time you invoke :wq!

Not for the faint of heart, but will score points with your nerd friends (won't attract babes, though).

[spiky_dog]

Originally posted by Love Calm Quiet:
So Ars Tech thinks that a command line editor is what's comparable to Notepad?

I don't think an "almost painful to use" command line editor is what ought to be recommended to a new iMini user.

the average user will not do well with vi. perhaps emacs is a better, more user friendly choice.

<-- vim for life.

[misc]

Originally posted by saddino:
Yes, a LOT of years. "vi" has been around since 1976. Bill Joy wrote it for BSD Unix to improve upon "ed" (or "ex") -- a line editor which, if you don't know, is as far from WYSIWYG as you can possibly imagine (I started writing C in "ex'). Many programmers fell in love with vi until emacs came along and split their allegience in two. To this day UNIX gurus argue over vi and emacs.

vi and emacs are installed with the BSD tools for OS X. Check them out in Terminal!

emacs is better

[LaGow]

Actualy, pico is probably not a bad middle-of-the-road solution between vi and emacs...as long as one wants to torture oneself with a command-line text editor.

Hadn't thought about it in a while, but there it was in Darwin.

[wataru]

I've never bothered figuring out vi or emacs. I used to use nano, an improved version of pico, but then I switched to see, which is SubEthaEdit's command line launcher thing. Not many other editors support Unicode correctly out-of-the-box.

[bmedina]

You guys really didn't sense the sarcasm in that sentence?

[Millennium]

I've grown perversely fond of vi over the years. It took me much less time to figure out than it's taken me to figure out Emacs, that's for sure. I even used the GUI version -gvim- for a while; it smoothes out most of the rough edges while keeping all the power at your fingertips.

This said, ever since TextWrangler went free I've been using that. I only use vi anymore when I need to use telnet or SSH (which is fairly often at work, so it's not like I'm out of practice). The learning curve for vi is absurd, but it's well worth it when you get into scripting and such.

[itai195]

Originally posted by LaGow:
No, you haven't. Vi is a default Unix command-line text editor that is almost painful to use. I only use it to edit config files.

Almost painful? Emacs is almost painful, but vi is torture.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally posted by itai195:
Almost painful? Emacs is almost painful, but vi is torture.

They are both torture but extremely powerful.

I would say, 99% of computers don't need to touch it. P.S. OS X also comes with pico which is very easy to use for new users. It's a good way to get your feet wet before downgrading/upgrading to vi.