[Beowulf] EMACS vs VI

[Bob Drzyzgula]

On 17/02/11 14:52 -0500, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Feb 2011, Bob Drzyzgula wrote:
>
>> Of course. Been there, done that, on a dial-up terminal with a thermal
>> printer at 110 baud over an acoustic coupler. If you know how to use
>> sed you probably can suss out ed. I had to know how to use edlin in
>> DOS, too. But if you had vi at all, you also had ex, so that was a
>> much better option.
>
> Yup.  I never really learned ex, but I used it a few times.  And of
> course vi on the inside has ex-like commands.

vi, at least originally, was just a full-screen front end on
ex, so vi is more than ex-like, it *is* ex. If you install
vim today, ex is just a symbolic link to vim, and when vim
detects that it has been started up as ex it just goes into
ex mode; if you type the "visual" command, it reverts to
full screen vi mode.

> I actually kept my old keyboards until they fell apart and then remapped
> keys both, but if you are a sysadmin you have to be able to sit down at
> a user's keyboard and work smoothly.  Smoothly does not involve turning
> on caps lock every time you try to move the cursor or page up or down or
> delete to end of line or...
>
> So you have to pretty much go with what is standard, even if it is
> painful and annoying.

In fact; I never went to the trouble of getting one of
those. On any given day I use might use a half-dozen
different keyboards, from a little netbook to a giant
Microsoft "Natural" keyboard. After you do that for enough
years it is all the same.

--Bob