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There's no reason to learn vi if you know Emacs. If you claim that Emacs isn't installed everywhere, guess what: Neither is vi. If you want an "installed every
by cbd1984 11y ago
There's no reason to learn vi if you know Emacs. If you claim that Emacs isn't installed everywhere, guess what: Neither is vi.
If you want an "installed everywhere" editor, learn ed. If you're willing to take an editor with you (or otherwise make sure a specific editor is everywhere you are), there's no reason it has to be vi.
- kec 11y agovi is a posix requirement, emacs is not. If the system you're working on has ed, it'll have some version of vi or vim as well.
- shabble 11y agoand not having to know ed is an excellent reason to learn vi :) obCompulsoryEdJoke: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html
- CPLX 11y agoThat was pretty damm amusing.
- endgame 11y agoa I learned ed for a joke and found myself actually liking some features so much that I started porting them to emacs. . w
- bch 11y agoI've used ed(1) to do complex(ish) programmatic edits to files that I think would have been extremely painful otherwise. An interesting editor worth spending at least a small amount of brainpower on.
- emidln 11y agoI don't think this is true. I've certainly been in a bunch of hairy situations over the years where I had nothing fancier than ed available to me because I was in some sort of recovery mode. The single user mode that FreeBSD comes with is lacking vi if, for example, you don't have / mounted yet. Thankfully ed is in the ramdisk.
- cbd1984 11y agoNot in Ubuntu.
- cogburnd02 11y agoV7/x86 [1] has both vi and ed, but ed is easier to get to. "Of course, we are not absolutely compelled to use ed, since V7/x86 comes with the full-screen editor vi (as well as the related line editor ex), but getting access to vi in this context would involve mounting the /usr filesystem and changing various environment variables and settings to allow editing in full-screen mode. Some basic ed skills are particularly useful in the V7 world, and most of all when one is involved on system administration tasks." [2] [1] http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/ http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/ [2] http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/doc/v7x86intro.pdf http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/doc/v7x86intro.pdf
- umanwizard 11y agoI can't remember ever encountered a unix-like system without "vi" installed. I've used (and set up) machines running FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, OSX, Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, ... Plenty of those didn't have emacs, especially on first boot, when you're most likely to need to modify network configuration files in order to get online to install new packages in the first place... Edit: By "vi" I mean that somewhere in the path there is a program called vi. Of course, usually this is nvi, vim, evil, etc; I don't mean the original UNIX vi binary.
- cbd1984 11y ago> I can't remember ever encountered a unix-like system without "vi" installed. Default Ubuntu install.
- umanwizard 11y agoWow, seriously? I stand corrected -- still much more likely to find than emacs.
- dagw 11y agoUbuntu (and Debian) comes with vi (not vim) by default. It's just not the default editor.
- artursapek 11y agoUbuntu 14.04, the default Ubuntu on EC2, definitely comes with vi.
- baby 11y agoI much prefer emacs and at least emacs shortcuts are by default in most shell (and everywhere in osx!) but no, every servers I install (debian, ubuntu, osx...) comes with vi but not emacs.
- cbd1984 11y agoAnyone considering using vi should be warned away by this practice of "disagreement by downvoting". If they do it here, imagine what they would do to a bug report!