Vi is such a useful tool!

DSpider · 2011-10-29 11:52:24

Vi, vim, emacs definitely isn't for me. Nano is good enough. Why would I wanna learn a new text editor (A TEXT EDITOR!), when nano just does the job? Hmmm... Maybe syntax highlighting? But then again, I'm no coder. I can look at code, understand little bits and pieces here and there, but I couldn't code to save my life!

The only time I barely even remotely come across vi is when I run:

sudo EDITOR=nano visudo

It's definitely not for everybody. I do a lot of manual editing (with Arch it's pretty much a given), and nano just does the job (for me). Would vi/vim make the job faster? I donno. Really! I don't know if dedicating some brain power to remembering a few dozen commands is simply worth it.

Stefan Husmann · 2011-10-29 13:36:03

davvil wrote:

Stefan Husmann wrote:
I like vi, but I do not like vim.
Interesting. Why is that, if I may ask?

I am an server administrator for about eleven years now. When I began, we mainly had propietary Unices like Sinix or NCR Unix, later Solaris (7,8,9) or HP-UX. None of them had a vim, but all had some kind of vi. So I am used to classical vi commands.

Nowadays we merely have Linux (RHEL) as unix-like OS. On these I have to use vim, as there is no other vi, and got disturbed by many "enhancements" vim comes with.

Vim to me has awful syntax highlighting. Much too many and the wrong colors. I prefer to turn it off.
After closing vim and opening it again with the same file, it keeps the cursor position. This is a misfeature to me, and I do not know how to turn it off.
In comparison to classical vi, vim is bloated.

JohannesSM64 wrote:

You should also consider Emacs. It's superior in some ways (particularly customizability, extensibility and documentation), but it takes a major investment to master it, some would say a lifetime investment. Generally Vim is a better choice for sysadmins working on many systems (since some variant of vi is available on every *nix system and vi(m) is great for quick edits), and Emacs for heavy coders.

This could have been written by me. For serious editing I also prefer emacs, but, as said by others, vi is more widely installed and you can work with it in a very fast way, if you know quite few keystrokes/commands, and so for the daily config file or small script it is the editor of choice.

For me the decision to drop vim as default vi in arch Linux was the best decision the Arch Linux developers did met in the last years .

Last edited by Stefan Husmann (2011-10-29 13:46:00)

karol · 2011-10-29 14:01:00

Stefan Husmann wrote:

After closing vim and opening it again with the same file, it keeps the cursor position. This is a misfeature to me, and I do not know how to turn it off.

Are you sure it's set on by default? I don't think so. Do we ship a default vimrc at all?
If you don't have viminfo set, this setting is off.
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Restore_curso … ng_session
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/s … ml#viminfo

Last edited by karol (2011-10-29 14:04:31)

Stefan Husmann · 2011-10-29 18:01:29

No, I am not sure. My experiences with vim come from RHEL. Under Arch I do not have vim installed.

bohoomil · 2011-10-29 22:49:13

As a matter of fact, syntax highlighting in Vim can be precisely fine-tuned, which requires tinkering with .vimrc a bit to achieve exactly what one wants the editor to do. Besides, it's always possible to turn on the compatibility mode if one wants to force a more traditional behaviour.

Arch Linux

#26 2011-10-29 11:52:24

Re: Vi is such a useful tool!

#27 2011-10-29 13:36:03

Re: Vi is such a useful tool!

#28 2011-10-29 14:01:00

Re: Vi is such a useful tool!

#29 2011-10-29 18:01:29

Re: Vi is such a useful tool!

#30 2011-10-29 22:49:13

Re: Vi is such a useful tool!

Board footer