I'm a long-time vi user: I was at Berkeley in the 1970's. I thought V6/V7 ed was a great advance over previous editors I'd used, and of course ex was quite clever as an enhancement. I used ex as it acquired the primitive “open” mode (sort of like a one-line-at-a-time vi mode) and then went on to the full page “visual” mode aka vi, which I have used ever since. When I switched to OS/X from FreeBSD some years ago, I continued to use vi/vim: its availability was one of the factors in my decision to switch. However, I found it increasing annoying over the years to have to switch between the vi keystrokes versus the fairly consistent GUI ones. It is true that vi advanced over the years (allowing free cursor movement in insert mode was a humongous advance, for example, even if it worked differently on different implementations of vi), but overall it was just too different in its basic conception from the GUI model. I tried as many GUI text editors on OS/X as I could, and to me, BBedit seemed to be the most complete replacement for vi in terms of having regular expressions, a command line interface, and so on. The current BBedit also has a number of nice features that vi (or at least the versions I used) does not: for example, I am particularly appreciative of their projects handling, especially the ability to (e.g.) “bbedit .” to treat a directory as an ad-hoc project. I have also found BBedit's handling of character encodings to be much more reliable than the vi's I've used (but of course as I say, vi is also moving forward). I also appreciate the html visualization mode.
Personally, if BBedit had a “vi mode” allowing the use of the legacy vi keystrokes in a document window, I might use it sometimes, but I'm generally glad for the greater consistency of the GUI mode, coupled with an otherwise satisfactory editor. (I still do use vi sometimes, and of course I have my shell set to « -o vi ».) Greg Shenaut -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "BBEdit Talk" discussion group on Google Groups. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at <http://groups.google.com/group/bbedit?hl=en> If you have a feature request or would like to report a problem, please email "[email protected]" rather than posting to the group. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <http://www.twitter.com/bbedit>
