Perhaps you are aware I am a big votary of vim. I can use vi too but I prefer vim.
I wrote my final year project report using emacs but after my fingers started aching or rather humorously I graduated from using emacs to using vim. So my love affair with UNIX is rather very very old. Even in those days when colleges did not have too many software savvy people I was familiar with UNIX,Linux, editing and so on. I was also familiar with the SMTP protocol and I have written automatic mailing software back then. Today after around 15 years I still do the same thing. E-mail software has become part of my bread winning strategy and lifestyle be it preventing spam or managing mail. Now back to editing. I edit plain text all the time. Be it a PDF document or a HTML document or a mail. I am always dealing with text. I don't use WYSIWYG editors. And a programmer uses an editor as part of the IDE or he just uses an editor to type in his code. So whether you are writing code or mail or creating a website an editor is critical. Just like we use UNIX and a language proficiency to improve our efficiency we can use editors to improve our effectiveness of editing. In that endeavor a very pivotal role is played by a very powerful editing software like vim. One could use vi too but vim is much better in my opinion. You have syntax highlighting, support for regular expressions, scripting and various mouse operations(gvim) and selection with 'v' and so on. Vi also has many of these but due to this vim depends on other shared libraries, so under certain situations vim may not work. There is also another really geeky line editor called ed. I have used ed also on occasions but that is more for restricted use. An editor improves your ability to get your job done and usually knowing a really powerful editor can improve your efficiency and save you time a lot more than knowing other tools. Investment of time and effort and memorizing is essential for effective software mastery and editing is a very important activity in that scheme of things. Type :help in vim or use vimtutor and get going! -Girish -- Gayatri Hitech http://gayatri-hitech.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
