On Mar 8, 2007, at 10:47 PM, Warren Taylor wrote:
It seems I've struck a nerve with my frustration using the native linux editors.
No, it's more that you've struck a nerve by wildly inaccurately denouncing emacs and vi as "weaker" than gedit. Less immediately accessible, sure. Less pretty in a GUI context, generally, sure (although you can do some awfully nice things with Emacs). Less powerful? Er, no. Not even remotely the case, at least for Emacs (which is what I use; I can't speak for vi users). Looking at the list of features at http://www.gnome.org/projects/ gedit/, the only thing I see that I can't immediately think of how to do with Emacs is print preview; I'd probably just postscript-print- buffer into GhostScript. Sure, gedit can do C, Perl, Python, and XML syntax highlighting. But does gedit have a COBOL editing mode? PL/I? Rexx? All with full syntax highlighting? All of those are in my .emacs file. I've needed and used all of them in the past year. But these are just things we'd expect any reasonably-competent editor to be able to do. Now, let's look at some of the lesser-explored corners of Emacs: Does gedit support psychoanalysis of Zippy the Pinhead? Of course it doesn't. (M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead, of course) Does it have a text adventure (M-x dunnet) you can play in one of its buffers? Didn't think so. Are there newsreaders for gedit (M-x gnus)? Doubtful. Can it even play Tetris ( M-x tetris) ? Seriously: "I don't like emacs or vi" is a perfectly reasonable statement to make. "I prefer gedit to either emacs or vi" is, again, wholly within the realm of rationality. "Emacs and vi are weak," not so much. Adam ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
