On Tue, September 27, 2005 5:08 pm, Nick Rout wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 16:59 +1200, Christopher Sawtell wrote:
>> On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 16:34, Carl Cerecke wrote:
>> > :q!
>> >
>> > The only one I need (and want) to know
>> So you must be mute?
>>
>> Surely you must need these as a minimum?
>>
>> a
>> Here is the Content
>> <ESC>
>> ZZ
>>
>> Difficult eh?
>>
>
> Not difficult, but definitely non-intuitive.
>
> Even gentoo, that more awkward of distros to install and configure,
> promotes nano as its default editor!
>
> I find myself using midnight commander's built in editor (mcedit if you
> want to invoke it outside the mc shell, F4 from within the shell) to be
> my most used editor, probably because I found mc early in my linux
> adventures, (before I even got X going) and have stuck with it.
>
> It probably isn't what a programmer would call a power editor, but it
> certainly has done me well over the years.
>
> For ages I never knew how to even get out of vi and often had to kill it
> from another console if I inadvertently invoked it.
>
> It also took me ages to realise that *nix users aren't always being
> literal, and that instructions like:
>
> vi /etc/passwd
>
> didn't actually mean you had to master vi, they just meant "use your
> favourite editor to make the following changes to /etc/passwd"
>
>
Gentoo doesn't even install vi in its minimal set. All that controlXY
cr*p... grr. Whats intuitive about that, if you've never used DOS editors?

And *never* vi /etc/passwd. There is the case, and this isn't apocryphal,
where the partition has filled up and is still being written to ( usually
a misspelled /dev/something ) and when you exit, you end up with a zero
length passwd file. This is why the command vipw exists.

vi is my weapon of choice - it does what it says on the tin. Things like
emacs are closer to an ide than an editor.

Steve
-- 
Windows: Where do you want to go today?
MacOS: Where do you want to be tomorrow?
Linux: Are you coming or what?

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