On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 10:54:48AM +0800, Sacha Chua wrote: > "Dean Michael C. Berris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > too much of your very little resources. why not explore other text > > editors like vi and nano? i think they're more lightweight than > > emacs. > > The thing with things like vi and nano is that, well, they're just > editors - you'll have to install other programs to read and write > mail, browse the Web, do other stuff... ;)
I find this humorous. Last night I read the post where someone noted that another poster had offered to buy Sacha a coffee somewhere, and that it looked as if he were asking her out on a date. For some reason, I'd never paid enough attention to detail to note that Sacha was, indeed, female, so I googled around a bit for information. After the first page that I saw, I almost came back to jokingly reply "yeah, too bad she's an Emacs geek". I now regret my decision to not post that reply :) > You can do all of those things within Emacs, which means > - you only need to learn one general set of keystrokes > - you can easily mix information from different places > - you can customize everything to an insane extent > > Who needs mc? I can do my directory management in Emacs. I can browse > (and edit!) files inside an archive, transparently read gzipped files > (no more lesspipe/lessfile or zless for me!), execute commands on > tagged files, and do all sorts of funky things. > > Plus... ummm... Emacs is really cute? Emacs is a religion, not an editor. 10 years ago it rocked. Why? Because we were all sitting in front of dumb serial terminals (real VT100's, and later versions like VT220's) where you could log in one single time. People used Emacs as a session handler. Some would say that Emacs was like a shell, but they were wrong. It was more like your window manager under X; it let you do many tasks and switch between them with a few arcane keystrokes. (and, yes, vi has really arcane keystrokes, too). And it let you have scrollback for your shell, something the lovely DEC terminals didn't do. The problem is, and always will be, that Emacs doesn't fit with the general Un*x philosophy of each tool being as simple as possible and doing one single job really well. That philosophy kind of breaks, anyway, when you get away from the basic command set. On the other hand, nothing else in the Un*x world has psychoanalyze-pinhead. vi is arcane, even vim is arcane, but it's very fast if you know how to use it. I have written thousands of lines of code in vi and Emacs, too, and I'd take the simple power of vi any day of the week. The problem is that your examples above are slightly wrong. See, I won't have to install another program to read email, browse the web, or do other stuff (whatever it may be), because I already have those programs. Plus, I'm either using X or Linux at a console where I can use Alt-F1 through Alt-F6 to get a few different terminals. Worst case I can run screen. Anything to stay out of Emacs! :) I'm not going to extoll the virtues of vi, simply because I don't want this crusade has been fought before, there's nothing more to add. I will simply say that I don't think I should have to waste 20MB (or however much it is nowadays) for an editor. But for those times when I *need* to psychoanalyze-pinhead, I'll apt-get install emacs and have at it. Michael -- Michael Darrin Chaney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.michaelchaney.com/ -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
