[sf-lug] On some commandline text editors

[Michael Paoli]

My favorite, is "of course" vi,
or more specifically in the land of Linux
typically nvi - though for many distros it can be installed/configured
as vi.
Yeah, I find vim quite annoys me:
https://www.mpaoli.net/~michael/linux/vim/vim_annoyances.txt
... though I can certainly do well enough with vim when/as needed.

And for folks looking to learn vi or other vi resources,
may want to peek here:
https://www.mpaoli.net/~michael/unix/vi/

I do also still quite like ed, and occasionally use it.  Similarly ex
(which is actually same program as vi).  Most notably:
ed is very light on resources and requirements,
ed and ex will even run perfectly fine on your hardcopy or truly dumb
terminal or generally if you don't have any proper TERM configuration
set or available at all,
and ed and ex are also very handy for easily self-documenting an edit
session.  E.g. using script(1) to document something, want to document
some edit changes that need to be done, use ed or ex and continue,
all nicely documented.  E.g.:
$ echo foo > file
$ cat file
foo
$ ed file
4
1,$p
foo
1
foo
s/foo/& bar baz/p
foo bar baz
a
two
three
.
g/two/s/two/2/p
2
w
20
q
$ cat file
foo bar baz
2
three
$
And resources:
$ cd /usr/bin && ls -iLno ed emacs ex nvi vi vim | sort -k 5,5bn -k 9,9
312514 -rwxr-xr-x 1 0   55744 Jan 15  2023 ed
312565 -rwxr-xr-x 3 0  472296 Oct 15  2022 ex
312565 -rwxr-xr-x 3 0  472296 Oct 15  2022 nvi
312565 -rwxr-xr-x 3 0  472296 Oct 15  2022 vi
312143 -rwxr-xr-x 1 0 3646968 May  4  2023 vim
313152 -rwxr-xr-x 1 0 6450472 Jun 24 21:54 emacs
$
And that's just the binary itself.
$

On Sun, Sep 1, 2024 at 2:39 PM Alex Kleider <alexkleider at protonmail.com> wrote:
>
> My favourite is vim.  Perhaps "favourite" is the wrong word. It's the only one with the features I value _and_ within my capabilities to use.  (I'm typing this while in Canada so please don't be too critical of the extra "u":-)
> Once installed, type "vimtutor" at the command line and you'll be moderately proficient at vim within an hour or so.
> When I first discovered Linux I tried emacs but it was beyond me.
> Many who program use IDE's to generate code but the command line with vim suits me best.
> My opinion fwiw:-)
>
> Alex Kleider  (set from my current gizmo)
>
> On Sunday, September 1st, 2024 at 11:03 AM, aaronco36 at sdf.org <aaronco36 at sdf.org> wrote:
> >
> > Please feel free to discuss and reveal your/others' preferred text
> > editors.
> >
> > -A
> >
> > [10]https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Vi
> > [11]https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Nvi
> > [12]https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Vim
> > [13]https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Neovim
> > [14]https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GnuEmacs