*BSD News Article 90020


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From: j@ida.interface-business.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: Betting on Unix
Date: 24 Feb 1997 17:15:01 GMT
Organization: interface business GmbH, Dresden
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"Terje A. Bergesen" <no.email@to.me.please> wrote:

> > > Or even vi, the most simple, yet incredible powerful editor there is.

> > You are probably right with some of your statements, but you err with
> > one: vi is everything else than ``most simple''.

> Ease of use doesn't nessesarily mean "easy to learn".

But you've been the one telling it were ``most simple''.  You might
attribute vi to whatever you want, but ``most simple'' is one of the
attributes it _doesn't_ deserve.

>  I can do much more with vi than with most other editors, much
> faster, and it didn't take me 10 years to learn, but it might have
> taken me 2 years.

Well, that's a misconception vi users rather often get acquainted to
(because they had to experience this learning curve, and now believe
that's the only possible way in the world -- since they can only
compare against far more incapable tools).

Of course, there are other editors as well that have at least the
power of vi, arguably even more power.  Yet, they don't take you 2
years of hard learning until you can use them reasonably, even if
you're probably not going to ever learn everything of them (but do you
need this?).  I think i don't need to mention Emacs here...  Just as
an example.  Unlike vi, it allows you for a much smoother learning
curve (even though it's idiosyncrasic enough), and it makes it much
harder to shoot in your foot.  In vi, a forgotten CAPS lock key might
turn out to be a big surprise, with incredible and irreparable damage
that can be done in very short time.  Sure, the typical vi user habit
of constantly hitting the ESC key while being idle on the keyboard
might prevent the worst :), but don't you think that's an abomination
rather than something very valuable?

As i wrote previously, you don't need to tell me about vi, i'm also
using it, but it's far away from being my most preferrable editor.
Even though i'm a fair vi hater, i used to know much more from it than
my former colleagues who've actually been using it exclusively.  Yet,
even though i'm using it, i don't like it.  (And for the record, all
those folks who later asked me to tell them how to get going with
Emacs came back two or four weeks later, telling me that they're now
wondering how they got along without it all the time.  :)  But i don't
wanna start a pointless editor flame war here, Emacs has its failures
as well, and there are some (but actually only very few) things that
can be done faster in vi.)

Peter H. Salus's ``A Quarter Century of UNIX'' also mentions the vi
history.  It explains that by the time vi has been created, it was
already very clear among those people who've investigated software
user interfaces that a ``modal editor'' (command mode, insert mode,
append mode, open mode) is indeed a very bad idea wrt. the user
interaction.  vi not only is a modal editor, but even worse: its
commands are case-dependant, with using the command with the wrong
case often causing it to do the opposite to the originally intended
command.


Tell me what you want, but ``easy to use'' or ``most simple''
evaluates to FALSE when `vi' is the question.  (That doesn't mean it's
useless, get me right on this.)

-- 
J"org Wunsch					       Unix support engineer
joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de       http://www.interface-business.de/~j