*BSD News Article 90699


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From: mike@quaking.demon.co.uk (Mike Richardson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: Betting on Unix
Followup-To: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Date: 7 Mar 1997 07:36:13 GMT
Organization: Series 1 Software
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References: <5d3sr2$44n@nntp1.best.com> <5dc7qq$hed@phoenix.sysbe.sysgo.de> <331D703C.971@absyss.fr>
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Douglas Seay (seay@absyss.fr) wrote:
: I've never looked for a definition of ``intuitiveness'', but I thought
: it was "once you know feature A, how easily to you use B for the first
: time".  same look-and-feel is IMHO the crux of intuitive.  vi has that.

: Command line arguements are

: 	colon [range] letter(s) [arguement(s)]
: 	ie- :.,$s/THIS/THAT/g
: 	ie- :wq

: and the rest are

: 	[times] letter(s) [arguement]
: 	ie- 5dd
: 	ie- dw

: The curve to learn "A" is steep, I think that most of us agree on that.
: And it takes forever to learn h-j-k-l if you don't have cursor keys on
: your keyboard.  But after that, the rest is easy, even "intuitive" :-)

: doug seay
: seay@absyss.fr

<snip>

On well, lets drop in my penny's worth. I agree that vi has a 'consistent'
set of commands, and that it is very powerful. My two major hates are (a)
that it has distinct insert and command modes and (b) lack of split windows.
Conversely, I disliked emacs because of its rather inconsistent command set.

In the end I reinvented the wheel, and wrote my own emacs-like editor which
has a user base of two (me and a friend). Still, I understand how it works,
its reasonably small, it runs under DOS, Windows and UNIX, and its extendable.
I guess it would actually have been better to use my time learning, say, emacs,
since even the most awful command set would be engraved on my brain after
a while. Still, it was educational and (possibly) fun :-)

mike