On 07/17/2015 09:44 PM, Russell Standish wrote: > I do know about emacs. It survives, because it is bloody good at being > a text editor, particular for programming. I suppose vi is the same - > I've seen some people make vi stand up and sing, but for me, its > behaviour when interacting with vt100 style terminals has always put > me off.
I agree (that both emacs and vi) are good text editors. But emacs, at least, is much more than just a text editor. I've used emacs as a window manager, spreadsheet, IDE, file manager, database, etc. It definitely has multiple and diverse aspects. But Marcus is right that it doesn't field the morons (or pander to users). The same is perhaps even more true of vi. You have to be a particular type of person to use the tool. But I think I disagree slightly with Marcus. Although it doesn't _pander_ to users, it provides a very navigable (damn near user-friendly, actually) exception system. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what went wrong when you do something stupid. You just have to be a little persistent. Such an exception system is always necessary for a tool with such a diverse set of functions. And that is in contrast to the sharply focused tools that dominate open source software. Mess up the configuration of, say, postfix, and you could spend a long while trying to figure out what you did wrong. So emacs is much more like libreoffice than it may seem at first glance. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
