Tuesday, January 11, 2000, 1:05:47 PM, Owen wrote:
> Why not complain
Because a computer professional is paid to work with computers.
Personally any such person who complains about an editor like TB!'s while
working on vi I'd really suspect their talents and experience.
> If their editors were all as different as the Bat!s, would I be very
> efficient?
Well, considering TB!'s is just a modified standard CUA (Windows, OS/2
and, to some excent, Mac all conform to some degree to CUA) I don't see how it
is any different than vim, elvis, nvi and VI[*] differ from one another.
> Fortunatly they all have vi, and it manages to word-wrap, and not destroy
> format, even on a vt100 plugged in the rear of a unixware box.
Unfortunately vi assumes you have a good termcap entry. Personally I
prefer joe since it has some termcaps builtin just incase the system termcaps
fail. Now, get yourself onto a Debian system or FreeBSD and you'll find out
something fun. They don't have vi standard.
So while you're sitting there crying like a little baby that vi isn't
anywhere in sight I'll find out that they have editors (ae and ee
respectively), those editors have help, look at the help, get the work done
and move on.
What I look for in an editor is features, not keybindings. I *prefer* to
have a unified editor and make steps to get people to that point, but I'm not
about to say that I am above learning an editor to get the job done or to
learn a new editor if the other parts of the application give me a boost in
productivity. That is why I switched from joe to vim even though I can't
stand vi keys (color syntax highlighting on perl code makes me more
efficient). That is why I switched from PMMail to TB! even though TB! doesn't
allow the use of an external editor.
If their editors were all different, would you be more efficient? If you
buckled up and used them instead of bowing out up front, yes. Why? You'd be
getting the work done instead of sitting there like some newbie computer user
wondering where the "any" key is.
> AND THIS IS JUST THE EDITOR! think filesystems, NIS, NFS, OS structure,
> sendmail, rsh, X, CDE, automounter, etc.. Are we learning yet.
Yeah. I've been working on a variety of unix and unix-like systems for
the past 10 years. Considering I can get up to an acceptable level of
productivity in a new editor in approximately an hour provided they have a
decent help system I don't see why any computer professional would whine about
an editor being "non-standard"[*].
> No, I have a lot of respect for people who say 'I don't need this
> complexity'.
I have more respect for people who get the work done instead of throw up
their hands and give up.
> I have no respect for people who who think they are the uber-geek in charge
> of telling people how wrong they are and putting others down. I used to be
> like you, but I grew up, got a life, and ain't looked back since.
I have no respect for people who are faced with the facts and decide to
look for a way out.
[*] VI, in caps, for a reason. There is no "standard" vi. There is a
definition of what a vi editor does but there is no longer a single source
tree for "vi" like there is for other editors. That is why there are
different vi alternatives like nvi, elvis, vim, viper (an emacs mode, really)
all of conform to the vi "standard" but add to it or fix "bugs" in the
standard. So any time anyone says "vi is everywhere" is really just fooling
themselves as, like other editors with a common definition but not a common
code base, there are variations in how the editor acts that must be learned
from system to system.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
ICQ: 5107343 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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