On Wednesday 05 February 2003 08:13 pm, David E. Fox wrote:
> > matter which machine I'm on in the future (be it a friends with linux on
> > it who's fubared X, or my own) I can edit files & cfgs quickly &
> > painlessly.
>
> Then vi should be worth learning. No matter what system you are going
> to work on - as long as it is Unix - vi is almost guaranteed to be
> there. If not, it'll fit on a floppy - as long as (of course) the
> binary is compatible with the target system. If you happent to be on a
> DOS or Windows based system, you might have difficulty, but there are
> versions of vi / vim that are runnable on Windows too. There are
> certainly other choices available, but vi is about the only real
> standard in editors. Back in the old DOS days, most everyone used
> something other than edlin.com to edit files, but if you were stuck,
> or if you had a friend with a sick system, about all you could
> guarantee is that edlin.com was available, or you brought it to the
> problem system.
>
> > FemmeFatale


Hmmm, e3 will fit on a floppy including all its source  and will run on 
embedded ARM-processor based systems as well as linux, FreeBSD and UNIX.  The 
version written in C uses only the Wordstar-compliant key bindings, and so 
also with the 16-bit systems supported (e.g. DOS), but the linux version and 
ARM version has keybindings matching

vi                      e3vi
emacs           e3em
pico/nano               e3pi
wordstar                e3 or e3ws
Nedit           e3ne

I have it on my system and also on floppy (DOS compatible).  It takes up very 
little space, even with source, and runs from a 12K file on my system.

It is not likely to be installed, but that is a relatively quick matter to 
fix.  What it took for 9.0 was copying its binaries to /usr/bin (doesn't 
depend on any external libs)  It even has an "Undo".

Now the one caution is that for supporting regular expressions it pipes 
through sed, so knowledge of sed is necessary to support regular expression 
manipulations.

I am not necessarily recommending it, though I do think the authors have done 
an excellent job with that tiny editor.  I just wanted to point out that the 
argument "everyone is using it, so you better learn/use it" could be applied 
to many, many situations, as in management's choosing an operating system, 
desktop, and office package for a large company without necessarily yielding 
the most compatible or technically best choices.

"We have met the enemy and he is US!!!!"
--Walt Kelly

Civileme



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