[Thad E Ginathom]

The vi fan gets ready for a fight...



Not really of course...

but no, vi doesn't (didn't) do stuff like that. It is a VIsual front end built on a command-line editor. It is just an editor, and perhaps not a very sophisticated one at that, although it packs the power of regular expression search and replace. Try getting used to MS Word Search and replace, having attained some ability with vi's pattern matching!

When I worked for a while on a support desk, two of us had to be officially instructed to use Wordperfect, which we were supposed to support, and not vi.

I guess emacs is more like a transformer toy: you want it to be a Centurian tank, type ctrl-x ctrl-c tank, and, errrr.... run fast!

vi caught my attention first; that's all I can say . Maybe it's like perl and awk. I learnt awk, and did a lot of data processing with it. Perl will do much, much more; I had the book on the shelf, I used to say I'll learn perl when I grow up!

By the way... I vaguely remember having some MS Unix tool set that was free, but might have been back on W2000.

People who are into this conversation are likely to enjoy the following two pages from xkcd:

Regular Expressions

Real Programmers

...in fact they are likely to enjoy xkcd, three times a week, anyway!

[lancer_rit]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

The vi fan gets ready for a fight...



Not really of course...

but no, vi doesn't (didn't) do stuff like that. It is a VIsual front end built on a command-line editor. It is just an editor, and perhaps not a very sophisticated one at that, although it packs the power of regular expression search and replace. Try getting used to MS Word Search and replace, having attained some ability with vi's pattern matching!

I guess emacs is more like a transformer toy: you want it to be a Centurian tank, type ctrl-x ctrl-c tank, and, errrr.... run fast!

vi caught my attention first; that's all I can say . Maybe it's like perl and awk. I learnt awk, and did a lot of data processing with it. Perl will do much, much more; I had the book on the shelf, I used to say I'll learn perl when I grow up!

By the way... I vaguely remember having some MS Unix tool set that was free, but might have been back on W2000.

vim does a file explorer using a standard plugin script. This works for both console mode and GUI mode (gvim) :-)
Of course, there are many file explorers in the X environments like KDE and Gnome.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Thanks --- just downloaded vim to take a look. I wonder how much of vi I can remember? Still got the books...

[lancer_rit]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Thanks --- just downloaded vim to take a look. I wonder how much of vi I can remember? Still got the books...

vim also has modes which work like a normal windows editor (no normal mode, insert mode etc - though a vi/vim old hand like me does not advocate it).
I don't think you forget vi if you didn't use it for a while - its like driving :-)
And do :help [<keyword>] and you get some of the best online help in any program - stuff that is actually helpful!

BTW, I am an awk guy as well. Never got around to learning perl properly

[Thad E Ginathom]

Well, in the days I learnt vi it was the only thing I had for writing and editing text. However, I've already found it useful for taking all the IMG tags out of a long post on another board where I'm a mod where a new member had linked to heaps of external pics, so it has earned its keep already .

And yes, I do remember quite a bit. Nice to meet another awker! That little grey book was, once, never far from my elbow

[csentil]

Having had a Solaris Server box as my desktop for more than 5 years, it took me more than a year to compromise on a Windows NT and then later 2000 !!! I believe I've rebooted the solaris box only twice or thrice in that time and it never hung up on me.

Glory days. I like Linux for what it has done, though I'm still a Unix fan !!

I've seen some expert vi users and I've been amazed the way they use it. I guess practice makes perfect.

kill rules !!