I started a new job this year and I was shocked to find that 95% of people I work with use vi on Linux. I learned emacs at my last job and it’s so much better than vi. I’ve had people tell me they know vi is horrible but yet they still use it. BTW, I am well aware that vi is always installed. But for Red Hat Linux emacs is always there too.
Maybe they’re used to it and are comfortable with it.
Hey, I still use FORTRAN.
I’m not sure how anyone can be comfortable with such a pile of crap. I suppose some people are just not into changing how they do things.
What the hell else am I going to do between V and VII?
I doubt there are too many people who learned to use vi first, and then refused to learn emacs later because emacs was too hard or new. For basic editing there’s nothing to learn.
More likely it’s that people like to flaunt their ability to use something kind of archaic that the younger kids find inscrutable. I’m going to be like that with parallel parking when all the cars of the future park themselves. I’m going to take every chance to show I can do it without computer assistance, dagnabbit!
As a certified Emacs nut, I will tell you this:
vi is great.
…for editing small things like config files, composing a quick email, or tweaking a crontab. I would never do any actual programming in it (heaven forbid!), but the dual-mode nature is great when you need to quickly load something up, navigate to a specific part, bash a couple keys, and save. It’s fast, too. For everything that Emacs gets us, we can’t claim speed as an advantage.
You stole my idea!
Attempting to start editor wars on the SDMB is punishable by being forced to use ed. So watch yourselves!
Once upon a time, text editing was done on a keypunch machine. Minor fixes could be done with an X-Acto knife. For the avant-garde there was always TECO.
I’m mildly offended that Bijou Drains refers to vi as a “pile of crap” (post #3 above), even if that is approximately true. emacs and vi have very different command structures, and some people may very well find one or the other to wrap one’s mind around.
vi was the first screen-oriented editor I learned, back in the day, and I found the command structure extremely logical and easy to learn. True, the dual modes (command vs. input) were rather a pain, but in those days, users were often connected via a modem which did its own thing with control characters, so you couldn’t use those for commands, and terminal keyboards didn’t have F-keys.
I’ve dabbled with emacs on and off over the years, and I’ve never gotten much into it. The command structure just isn’t compatible with my neural circuits. Many commands seem to require more keystrokes than they should. Many are not very mnemonic, or so it seems to me.
BTW, who knew that emacs was somehow originally derived from TECO?
ETA: This is the 21st century, everybody. We have Linux. We have GUI’s. We have gedit. For you Winders prisoners, you can have Notepad++
I’ve had it with these insults. I demand satisfaction. We will settle our differences on the field of honour. We will retreat the ten paces and launch our editors against each other. Yours may have the greater mass, but I assure you mine has the greater velocity. You do the physics.
I was forced to use vi once in my Data Structures class. Never again.
I am going to be a complete heretic in this vi versus emacs debate. My favorite command line editor of all times is the one built into the old Norton Commander program which now lives on in the form of Midnight Commander. I’ve programmed tons of C code in Midnight Commander Edit and its a breeze for quickly editing config files and other stuff. Yeah, I spend a lot more time in graphical editors nowadays, but for command line, nothing beats Midnight Commander!
Emacs is for people who like to memorize esoteric command sequences to do anything (sure ctl-alt-meta-p-shift-a-alt-q-shift-tab probably makes your breakfast, but how in the hell do you remember this crap?). You don’t need cheatsheets for Emacs, you need cheatbooks!
Vi is for people who like something simple made unnecessarily complex – two modes? Why? My arrow keys work just fine. Must have been designed for a keyboard which did not have arrow keys, home, end, insert, etc. Well, I guess the day I run into a keyboard like that, I’ll be happy for vi – hasn’t happened yet. Guess I would need Skald’s time buggy to go back far enough in caveman days to find a time where I need vi because my keyboard only has letters and numbers on it.
I had a programmer go off once that “emacs is a fat bloated pig!” Of course, this was in 1997, and the sonofabitch ran off with my wife. Serves both of them right.
I like vi, but I love vim.
Longtime CS prof. I found it hundreds of times easier to teach newbies vi than emacs. Much easier to start from scratch and getting them doing something fairly soon. Very nice learning curve.
I like modes. I hate having to learn a lot of keypress combinations.
I’ve done a lot of serious programming and vim just works with no fuss or muss.
It’s not for everything. Prose-like stuff not so much. So even doing html isn’t such a good idea. So I am not in the panacea crowd or anything like that.
Why do people use vi? Because it’s better than emacs.
Anything else I can C-h you with ?
Emacs is a full-featured OS that lacks a decent editor.
If you had told me in 1980 that the emacs/vi war would still be being fought in 2012 (or that anyone would still be using either in an era of usable text editors), I’d have laughed at you. Serves me right, I guess, but at least this is the first time I’ve seen it in a while.
I never liked vi. Never. And I’ve been working since the tail end of the punch card era.
It does seem a bit bizarre, doesn’t it? Do you think they’ll start arguing about the relative merits of 5 1/4" vs. 3.5" floppy disks next? Or DOS vs. OS/2?
For the record, my preferred editor back in my UNIX/LINUX/XENIX days was vedit, the more verbose version of vi.