> What editor do you prefer, then? > > I have been making a little effort in the last year or two to come to grips > with vi or vim, and am starting to prefer it, but ISTM that the problem with > traditional Unix editors (i.e. vi & emacs) is that they depend upon learning > obscure keyboard shortcuts.
When I shifted to Linux full time a couple years ago, I decided to force myself to learn vi. I don't make any claims that it's better than emacs or any other editors out there. But for more advanced editors, I think it's necessary that there will be some learning curve, and then the "best one" is just what you bothered to learn. Emacs looks great, but I don't have a clue how to use it. Sure, the shortcuts are obscure, but I think even with a modern editor, shortcuts are obscure to the uninitiated. >From this basic stand-point, I haven't found anything vi can do that emacs can't and vice-versa. But I just started forcing myself to use my editor of choice for everything, and then finding work-arounds (for example, in vi :set paste when you want to paste stuff from the main buffer (a la shift+insert in Konsole) without retarded indentation) and keeping a small notebook for the vi commands I "learned." You can start making customized macros (I have one for printing the date, for example, for log files), customized highlighting (find one online you like the most and slowly tweak it), and nice default settings (like line numbering auto-enabled, for example). So, my advice would just be to make some kind of informed decision on which editor to use, and stick through the learning curve. It's much like choice of linux distribution. You can always change, but you ought to stay with your initial choice long enough to be competent with it. Besides, once you learn lots of obscure shortcuts, as one of my friends said, "You can contort your hands in strange ways and make magic happen!" ~daid
