Harald Maaßen wrote: > Thanks Kenneth, could't have said it better. I only want to give one + > to this.
If it was up to me I'd have kicked vi out of the LPIC-1 exam five years ago – not because I think it isn't worth knowing about, but because one can learn everything anyone could ever conceivably need to know about vi (and then some) in a 20-minute session with “vimtutor” and it is stupid to ask questions on that stuff; we don't ask people questions about the keyboard and mouse, either. It's probably a good idea for budding Linux sysadmins to futz around with vi for a while, much like engineering students are required to futz around with hand tools for a while even if in real life they use CNC machines (and it's nice to be able to make do with hand tools if your CNC machine has broken down). I get the “vi is everywhere” argument, but for some considerable time now mainstream Linux distributions have been more likely to come with something like nano or pico, rather than vi, out of the box, so that doesn't really hold water anymore. Finally, on Linux, few people if any actually use *vi*, a very primitive editor by 21st-century standards, in their daily lives – even those people who *think* they're using vi generally use vim instead, which is a much more capable program that has about as much to do with vi as an F-16 has to do with a Piper Cub but is not part of the official LPIC curriculum. I've been at this business for quite some time and I realise that in spite of all this, the vi requirement isn't going away. I think of it as a bizarre hazing ritual that is being forced on newbies by the old hands in the spirit of “we had it bad, so by G*d you'll also have it bad”. There are lots of things more worth knowing about (and examining) than vi but there apparently needs to be some kind of disgusting tradition to separate the men from the boys, like you can't be an Army ranger if you haven't marched thirty miles per day for a week with nothing to eat but earthworms that you've caught yourself. Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau · ans...@tuxcademy.org · https://www.tuxcademy.org Freie Schulungsmaterialien für Linux und Open-Source-Software Free Training Materials for Linux and Open-Source Software _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list lpi-examdev@lpi.org http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
