On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 06:42:14PM +0100, Tony Finch wrote: > On Mon, 21 May 2007, H.Merijn Brand wrote: > > > > So untrue. Following up on Abigail's hate, there have been numerous > > times in the recent month that I typed 'ex -v' just to NOT get into > > some vi clone like gvim or vim. > > Are you actually getting Joy's vi or is it Bostic's nvi? The latter is in > many ways less hateful than the former (or at least the version shipped by > Sun), e.g. because of infinite undo and not crashing when you make the > terminal window too large.
While infinite undo is nice, I happily trade it for consistency. If I install a system, one of the very first things I need to do after the initial install from CD is to an editor. At that moment, I don't need infinite undo - I'm not going to do hour long sessions; I'm going to do make many small edits. And on SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, SGI, etc, 'vi' just works. I can configure the system, create users, set up permissions, etc, until I can install the vi-clone of my choice. The 'vi' that comes with the system is consistent enough to not notice (no doubt some long sequence of keystrokes noone ever uses anyway will behave different). But not so on Linux. I have yet to spot any Linux developer (or distro vendor) that actually cares about consistency. Or backwards compatability. Abigail
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