[clug] Text editor

[Scott Ferguson]

On 26/10/14 10:24, Jason Ozolins wrote:
> 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 stand corrected. A thoughtless mistake given that my first anvil is a
short length of rolled steel train track :\

It's remains a tortured analogy.

That someone learning vi, complains about vi.... is difficult to find a
rational explanation for.

> 
> 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

If only to reduce the amount of time it takes to effect changes to a
live environment.
Alas, the world if far from perfect - I've come across boxes without
even nano, but fortunately I've not come across one without vi.

> 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

Kind regards