[web-team]Re: [Officers] vi

[Marc MERLIN]

On Thu, Jun 29, 2000 at 08:30:17AM -0700, Amy Abascal wrote:
> Ok, so who screwed up vi on the SVLUG box?  Fess Up!

(sorry for the late  answer, I'm just now catching up  with the 1000+ Emails
that landed in my personal mailbox this week)

I've already talked to Amy on friday.
The short version is that debian comes  with nvi by default, which of course
doesn't understand a user's .vimrc file, like  vim did on the old svlug box,
so one  night where I  was trying to  get mailman to  work and that  for the
third time nvi had  botched one of my files (no multiple  undos like vim), I
put vim back to restore what we had on the old box.

The only "detail" is that the old svlug was RH 4.2 with a really old vim and
that debian has a vim that  is vastly newer and improved. Color syntaxing is
of course  an addition (it's  an aquired taste:  some people hate  it, other
love it. I  find it useful as  it shows my  typos (like not closing  a quote
when  I  type  HTML)), and  the  two  features  that  Amy didn't  like  were
incremental matches  during searches and  mouse awareness (you can  have the
old xterm cut and paste behavior with shift+button).
Regardless, I usually turn those new  features off by default when I install
a recent vim somewhere because I know that they're disconcerting for someone
who's used to Bill Joy vi, but that evening I forgot, it was really late and
I was in a hurry to go to bed so as not to be too dead the next day.

Amy seemed happy with vim yesterday once those two features were turned off.

Marc
-- 
Microsoft is to software what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
 
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