[Beowulf] 9 traits of the veteran Unix admin

[Gavin W. Burris]

I'm an emacs-to-vim convert.  Join me, brothers and sisters!

But seriously.... I used to spend way too much time customizing every
aspect of ever aplication I used.  This included my .emacs.el file.
I've stopped doing this because I have real programming to do, and I
have to choose my battles.

Now I'm more of the minimal-changes, as-default-as-possible camp.  Out
of the box, vim does everything I need it to do, and I don't waste hours
every time an update breaks my many-layers-of-dependencies emacs
environment.  Trying to do everything in emacs was one of the worst
timesyncs I've every engaged in.

Keep it simple, learn your editors use of regular expressions, and use
automation shortcuts.

Cheers.

On 02/17/2011 10:33 AM, Bob Drzyzgula wrote:
> There's a saying among photographers that the best camera
> is the one you have with you. I think a similar argument
> can be made for editors -- the best editor is the one
> you know how to use.ul 16, 2009 9:00 AM
> 
> While I am firmly in the vi camp -- the only emacs
> command I ever really managed to learn was ^X^C -- there
> are historical reasons for this.  I learned Unix on a
> standalone system (a Sun 2/120 with SunOS 1.1) without
> any access to the Internet, and vi was the only editor
> available on a stock install of that system that was worth
> learning. By the time I had access to emacs a lot of my
> vi knowledge had kind of moved into my brain stem.
> 
> While I tried to learn emacs a couple of times, it just
> seemed like it took forever for the thing to load. I expect
> with modern computers this is less of a concern, but at the
> time, for a systems person who had to do small amounts of
> work on a large number of systems rather than a lot of work
> on a single system, this was a major issue.  Actually, I've
> always assumed that any applications programmer/systems
> programmer correlation with emacs/vi preferance stems
> largely from this one factor (rgb: yes, I know, jove; but
> sorry, you're in a very small club there). In any event,
> on top of this I found emacs very alien and disconcerting,
> so I gave up on it.
> 
> But none of this means that vi is "better" than emacs,
> just that it is better for me, because I already know how
> to use it. I could write a treatise about why I like vi,
> but none of my arguments would ever be any more compelling
> to an emacs user any than their affinity for the disaster
> that is emacs :-) would be to me.
> 
> --Bob Drzyzgula
> 
> 
> On 17/02/11 07:14 -0700, Michael H. Frese wrote:
>> Let the Editor Wars begin!
>>
>>
>> Mike
>>
>> At 09:10 AM 2/16/2011, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
>>> Anyone see this yet? He's pretty dead on, IMHO, especially 5,6,9
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.infoworld.com/t/unix/nine-traits-the-veteran-unix-admin-276
>>>
>>> --
>>> Prentice
>>>
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-- 
Gavin W. Burris
Senior Systems Programmer
Information Security and Unix Systems
School of Arts and Sciences
University of Pennsylvania