> Searching the web for people's views on writing methods I > found a number who said that one should use vim for > programming but emacs for other kinds of writing. So I had a > look at emacs out of curiosity but couldn't see any real > advantage for me in learning it. Am I missing something here? > Is anyone else still using vim for writing lengthy texts?
Me :) Yes, there's a decently sized contingent of [La]TeX users on the vim ML, but they mostly appear to answer questions about Vim+[La]TeX integration plugins or use, and then they go silent. Which is how the list works in general -- ask a question and usually the right people pick up on it and answer; instead of having people write unsolicited diatribes on their favorite topics whether [La]TeX, scripting, Ex commands, or Unicode/BOM/character-encodings stuff (though I've gotta admit that just about everything I know regarding U/BOM/ce, I've learned from Tony's elucidating replies that occasionally go off on pedantic dissertations -- thanks, Tony!). I think Vim's primary users are "people who want to edit text more efficiently". A large subset of those lazy people (self included) are programmers, but do include [La]TeX users, system administrators, people who email a lot and use Vim as an external editor...and the list goes on. I tinkered with Emacs but grew frustrated with (1) using it over remote SSH/telnet/RS-232 connections that didn't always reliably send things like alt/meta or arrow keys; (2) at the time, on my underpowered 486 DX/100, Emacs was a dog; and (3) it was harder to be productive out of the box without amassing a customized config file that I then had to tote around and keep in sync across machines. Tim O'Reilly had a good post[1] about this around the time I made the full-time jump to Vim. So now I use Vim like I used to use qedit in DOS to write all my papers, project documentation, code, and other text-format content. Except, well, email and text-boxes on web pages (though there are TB/FF plugins for that) -tim [1] http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/1999/unix_editor.html -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
