editor wars! vim vs. emacs. WIMPY vs. fullscreen. ed is the one true editor!

[Jonathan Arnold]

Derek Martin wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 06:45:32PM -0500, Brendan Kidwell wrote:
>> Well, I really shouldn't have started an editor war or anything like
>> it. :^) Honestly, I just can't adapt to vim or emacs. I grew up with
>> MS-DOS and Windows, and quit using Windows full time some time in
>> the past few years.
> 
> Have you tried Xemacs?  It has all the features and power of emacs
> plus pull-down menus for many of the most common actions, and even has
> context-specific menus for various modes.  It is definitely not as
> light-weight as a vi clone, but most emacs fans will tell you that
> this is just fine, because you should never, ever exit emacs. ;-)

Well, both Xemacs and Emacs, the X version, have a nice GUI interface,
complete with drag select, menus, toolbars, mouse support, etc. I agree -
ff you haven't used the GUI version of Emacs recently, I highly recommend
you give it a try.

>> I have no trouble using CLI programs (non-interactive; using
>> switches and pipes and all that) but I simply can't adapt to any
>> interactive program that uses an interface unlike the standard
>> so-called WIMPy interface: windows and pull-down menus
> 
> Humans have survived this long because we are very adaptable.  I'd be
> willing to bed that if you go through the tutorials, and then forced
> yourself to use either vim or emacs, and nothing else, for all your
> text-editing needs for a week, you'd kick yourself for not having done
> so earlier.  There's a reason that the editor war is always between
> vi(m)/emacs... =8^)

And the most important one to me is that I know that, no matter when,
where or on what OS, I'll always have an Emacs. My .emacs file goes
back nearly 20 years at this point and while each version requires
adjusting of it, the basics have always been the same, from the Unix
mainframe I started using it with, to VMS to DOS to OS/2 to BSD
to Linux and beyond. As someone who works on multiple systems
all the time, it is an absolute savior.

-- 
Jonathan Arnold                       http://www.buddydog.org

I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side -- I've noticed those with the most
opinions often have the fewest facts. -- Bethania McKenstry

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