Notepad vs. VI Showdown

Ovid on 2004-04-01T16:41:51

Given the choice between Notepad and Vi, it should be clear that there is no choice. Even if you're an Emacs fan, I suspect you'd choose Vi (assuming you knew it). I've a friend who's learning Perl and he uses it quite a bit now. I've also introduced him to Vi and he's gotten quite used to it.

And then there's his job. He has to write a lot of VBScript and he's discovered that he has a mental block that somehow forces him to use Notepad when using this language. Somehow, I think there's something deeply symbolic about this :)

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As time goes vi...

WebDragon on 2004-04-01T19:35:31

first there was notepad. and it was good.

then there was vi, and it was better.

then there was vim, which seriously pisses in vi's cheerios.

I've even brought over a port of vim to my old MacOS 8.6 machine, I like it so much. Even stopped using BBEdit over there.

Lately I've tested bluefish and quanta on Fedora Core 1 for web development and continually kept going back to gvim as I was just far more productive in it. EVEN given all these extras that come with those two. (I also tried screem but it's IMHO not ready for prime time yet)

So, this client's site, which uses Perl (CGI.pm, DBI, DBD::mysql), PHP, MySQL, Javascript, HTML 4.01, CSS2, all beautifully woven together, was basically done entirely in vim. The syntax highlighting and auto-indenting are superior. macros, multi-windows, multiple clipboards, marks, comment-folding. Life is good. :o)

Re:As time goes vi...

kag on 2004-04-02T19:01:51

First there was ed, and it was THE STANDARD.

Then there was vi, but it required grabbing a glass terminal, and who could manage that?

Then there was emacs, which thrashed magnificently on underspecced timeshared Vaxen.

But emacs grabbed the finger-control neurons, so must now be ported to any new platform before work can be accomplished.

I still sometimes use ed for those "change one line" jobs.