[clug] Text editor

[Jason Ozolins]

On 26/10/14 8:12 AM, Scott Ferguson wrote:
> On 25/10/14 23:56, Andrew Janke wrote:
>>> Is it an exercise in industrial
>>> archaeology, like learning to make cast-iron railway lines?
>
> A tortured analogy? :)
> AFAIK cast-iron railway lines haven't been improved on....

erm, they've been made with hot rolled steel for quite a while:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_(rail_transport)#Rail

I mostly use vim because I got used to vi as the lowest common 
denominator across the Solaris, Linux and embedded Linux boxes I was 
administering. This is for viewing files (it's fun when your 
minimalistic Linux terminal server lacks "less"), scripting, and 
configuration file tweaking.  Less' regex support also seems a bit 
lacking when I'm searching for patterns with fiddly characters.

If I were writing a thesis, or hacking large-scale software, I'd use an 
IDE or go to the trouble of customising Emacs to the point where it 
doesn't give me the irrits, but that would done in one environment I 
care enough about to do interior decoration, as opposed to machines I 
just administer.

In a perfect world, you're doing all the editing on dev/test machines 
and incorporating those changes into an infrastructure/config management 
system like Puppet or Chef, but when you have to firefight on some 
random box, or even prototype your changes on development machines, 
vi/vim comes in handy.

-Jason