On 2005.3.3, at 07:15 AM, John Delacour wrote:
At 9:45 pm +0000 2/3/05, Phil Dobbin wrote:
I'm thinking that if he's not comfortable with pico maybe emacs is not the best idea...
I'd love to hear a convincing explanation from someone why anyone would use such tools in preference to TextWrangler, BBEdit or Affrus. I can imagine they'd make it a chore to write code in us-ascii and either a nightmare or an impossibility to deal with non-ascii, but maybe that's because I'm just an unreformed Mac user :-)
Two points, or maybe three --
One, vim can be customized to handle mult-byte characters. Emacs, can, too, from what I hear. I'm personally not satisfied with the results, but it does "work", even if it's rather clumsy.
I have the impression that pico can also be customized, since there are a number of Japanese people who use it.
The other, vi is, as has been mentioned, almost always there, and it's much easier to use than ed.
Also, vi inherits a lot of powerful macro processing capabilities from ex/ed that are somewhat arcane, but still useable. If you're comfortable with vi and can keep track of the arcane syntax, it pretty much lets you do everything you can do in mpw.
I personally use whatever's handy, but when I edit the files under /etc, I usually don't really want to waste the time fiddling with permissions and such. And if I have to type the file path in by hand anyway, I might as well open up a terminal and use vi.
