Oh no he di-int.
Yes, I know.
The point remains, vi sucks.
Well, if vi sucks, then so does using Windows only through shortcuts. That’s not really the point. The point is that knowledge of neither of these tools really makes you any kind of genius (and Windows shortcuts particularly less so).
I absolutely agree.
Edlin is even worse, in my opinion. How nice it was to finally get a full-screen text editor upon release of DOS 5.0.
I’d argue with you, but the Video Professor doesn’t have a vi CD, so you’d never believe me.
I think that’s probably the most germane point in this thread. When I’m entering data at a speed most of you can only dream of (I know, you all dream of doing hours of data entry every day - I can feel your hot envy from here), it’s almost exclusively keyboard. Few other jobs require you to keep your hands on the keyboard and leave the mouse alone like that. I wouldn’t measure a consultant by his shortcut skills, but any secretary/accounting clerk worth their salt should know drop-downs, shortcuts, and right and left mouse button menus.
You are all missing the point. You could (I think) train a monkey to effectively point and click or use “F” whatever to get something done. The computer is nothing but a tool, and no better or more intelligent than the person using it.
Consultants get pait b/c they understand the business process and bigger picture. Users do not b/c they argue over whether its more effecient to use a keyboard over a mouse. Unless your a stenographer, it makes no fucking difference. Either you can do your job or or you can’t. SAP is bloatware, but so is Windows.
What is this thread about? The consultants, or the businesses that hire engage them b/c they can’t hire competent people that can think outside a box?
You are all missing the point. You could (I think) train a monkey to effectively point and click or use “F” whatever to get something done. The computer is nothing but a tool, and no better or more intelligent than the person using it.
Consultants get pait b/c they understand the business process and bigger picture. Users do not b/c they argue over whether its more effecient to use a keyboard over a mouse. Unless your a stenographer, it makes no fucking difference. Either you can do your job or or you can’t. SAP is bloatware, but so is Windows.
What is this thread about? The consultants, or the businesses that hire engage them b/c they can’t hire competent people that can’t think outside a box?
Your assumptions are invalid: I have no idea what Wikipedia may have said about vi; I have experience with at least seven separate editors on a wide variety of machines; I am not enthralled by Microsoft anything and certainly would never judge software by whether Office happens to operate on it.
vi was a perfectly nice example of a good geeky solution to a limited keyboard on some rather primitive computers. However, thirty years later, it is simply a relic of an older time. If you’re stuck using it in place of something designed to make one’s job easier on a 101+ key keyboard, then you have my sympathy, but even Unix typically runs on smarter computers with I/O devices that contain actual functions in 2006.
Bullshit. vi’s been constantly improved for those thirty years, and recent versions of vim can get bloated enough to rival Emacs, depending on the number of plugins you load.
Still, the stock binary is only about 1MB, and it’s better at actually editing text than any other editor I’ve ever used.
What bullshit is this? There’s nothing about vi that is a solution to a limited keyboard. vi is totally agnostic to the type of keyboard you’re using. Do you even know what the fuck you’re talking about?
Right. Which is why it still comes standard on every standard unix or linux distribution. Which is why it’s still part of the single unix standard. Which is why people still actively use it and choose it over other editors. :rolleyes:
Please stop with the appeals to ignorance; just because you aren’t familiar with it or never found it useful, do not generalize your inexperience and ignorance to the entire rest of the world.
Constantly improving for thirty years, yet it still sucks.
Isn’t there something like Gawdin’s law that states that the longer a computer thread goes on the more likely it is that it devolves into a VI vs Emacs flame fest?
I was going to come in here and pit the pitter for thinking that the keyboard shortcut skills that I don’t have could possibly matter.
Then I realized he was talking about the shortcuts I do know, so now I agree. Everyone who doesn’t know them is a mouth-breathing idiot.
Okay, actually I think that judging people on their shortcut-fu is idiotic. What matters is if someone brings skills of real value to the job. Not knowing basic shortcuts may simply be a matter of a person thinking graphically, or not liking to switch between mouse and keyboard, or having a mindset that causes them to use whatever tool they used last, or whatever. I find myself mousing between fields in forms all the time, and I know damned well how to use tabs and enter. It’s just that my brain thinks ‘mouse’ first. If I’m in a long form entry page, I’ll switch to keyboard shortcuts.
But who really cares? What matters is if the consultant gets the job done. Not how he does it, or whether you think his computer skills are cool enough.
's funny. Every keyboard in every other editor I have ever used has an actual key to do insert, delete, backspace, etc. Only in vi did I have to ESC out of entry mode to command mode to simply perform a natural keyboard function, then shift back into entry mode to get some work done. I think that having an editor that can perform on limited keyboards is a wonderful idea. I just see no real reason why I should have to mess with such primitive tools now that the keyboards actually embrace the necessary functions.
As for editing text, TSO/ISPF and its microprocessor equivalent, SPF2, can edit text in ways that vi cannot dream of, using simpler instructions and with better recovery functions.
It is true that vi comes with every Unix install: it’s free. It is probably not a bad thing to have on the system in case something blows up and prevents all the useful programs from running. At that point, one could employ vi long enough to get something productive running. From that perspective, it is certainly a nice emergency tool to have laying about, much like having a crescent wrench and a multiblade srewdriver in the trunk of a car. However, if I wanted to perform serious mechanic work on a car, I would prefer to have a complete toolbox, not the most primitive examples of late 19th century tools.
I’m confused, Tom. Are you saying Word is better than vi, or that emacs is, or that Notepad is?
I do my work on Solaris, and StarOffice is superior for documents where you want nice fonts and such. But for notes and code, and lists of stuff that is going to go into other programs, you can’t beat text.
People are prisoners of their tools. I see people struggling to do stuff in spreadsheets all the time, and failing, that I can do easily by exporting the data into csv and writing a little script.
I don’t like vi, but that’s just my personal preference. There are lots of good reasons to avoid the software inserting unreadable junk for you. There are certain times I wish I had runoff or nroff or the Bell Labs Memorandum Macros back.