5 ms·

Give me Vi or give me death! JK - glad to see Nano is still being developed. It was my first editor on Linux before I could learn Vi/m.

blippage 4y ago
> Give me Vi or give me death! When I was doing my PhD back in the 90's, I was mostly using Windows 3.11 and writing in Fortran. My editor: Notepad. Seems incredible now. The big boys doing other research had Unix boxes, big expensive Silicon Graphics machines of various colours, I believe. One of the programmers explained to me that vi was an excellent editor, and how you used h,j,k,l to move around. I kinda rolled my eyes and thought he was mad. A systems programmer also suggested that I used "make". I couldn't understand the point of that, as that was what batch files were for. Roll on to the present day, and vim is my editor of choice. I did flirt with emacs at one point, but gave it up as too much configuration is involved. On vim, I do virtually no configuration. I have no plugins whatsoever, although I have set up a few custom bits and pieces in .vimrc. With just one file, it makes it very easy to bring up a new machine for me. I've come to the conclusion that emacs and vim are very different philosophies. With emacs, it works the way you want. With vim, you work they way vim wants. So ditch your plugins, and use vim the way nature intended. Before doing my PhD, I did a masters jointly split between two universities. I think you can tell a lot about universities by what computer systems they have. One university had a lot of Sun systems. The file servers were prone to the odd hiccup, mind. At the other university, it was mostly Windows systems. In order to program in Fortran, we had to log into the university's computer (it was some Unix system, although I don't know specifics) via telnet, or something. And use "ed". Boy, was there some bellyaching from the students over that one! I always preferred the university with the proper Unix workstations. The Windows ones always seemed a bit of a joke, without proper software like Maple (IIRC).

blippage 4y ago

> Give me Vi or give me death! When I was doing my PhD back in the 90's, I was mostly using Windows 3.11 and writing in Fortran. My editor: Notepad. Seems incredible now. The big boys doing other research had Unix boxes, big expensive Silicon Graphics machines of various colours, I believe. One of the programmers explained to me that vi was an excellent editor, and how you used h,j,k,l to move around. I kinda rolled my eyes and thought he was mad. A systems programmer also suggested that I used "make". I couldn't understand the point of that, as that was what batch files were for. Roll on to the present day, and vim is my editor of choice. I did flirt with emacs at one point, but gave it up as too much configuration is involved. On vim, I do virtually no configuration. I have no plugins whatsoever, although I have set up a few custom bits and pieces in .vimrc. With just one file, it makes it very easy to bring up a new machine for me. I've come to the conclusion that emacs and vim are very different philosophies. With emacs, it works the way you want. With vim, you work they way vim wants. So ditch your plugins, and use vim the way nature intended. Before doing my PhD, I did a masters jointly split between two universities. I think you can tell a lot about universities by what computer systems they have. One university had a lot of Sun systems. The file servers were prone to the odd hiccup, mind. At the other university, it was mostly Windows systems. In order to program in Fortran, we had to log into the university's computer (it was some Unix system, although I don't know specifics) via telnet, or something. And use "ed". Boy, was there some bellyaching from the students over that one! I always preferred the university with the proper Unix workstations. The Windows ones always seemed a bit of a joke, without proper software like Maple (IIRC).