On 11/08/2008, Martin DeMello <martindemello / gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/9/08, Joshua Ballanco <jballanc / gmail.com> wrote:
>  >
>  > This will never end...
>  >
>  >  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_wars
>  >
>  >  (there's a few good chuckles to be found in the links)
>
>
> "I just want an EDitor! Not a "viitor". Not an "emacsitor". Those
>  aren't even WORDS!!!!"

´ăˇ×¤ălooks like a good enough word ;-)

Honestly I like to use a viitor when working with a piece of text for
a longer time or when writing code. I learned vi in an Unix class, and
since it looked odd enough to be interesting I gave it a try. Now when
I sit before an editor window full of text it makes me grind my teeth.
You cannot beat the counted movement commands of vi with pretty menus.

Another advantage of vi (or ed) is that you can edit your config files
even if you log in to your system using a crooked path with several
intermediate machines. In such situations extra keys like meta,
delete, arrows, backaspace, ... might get lost in translation but the
viitor still works like a charm.

I do not use much of the power of VIM and the fact you cannot use
movement commands in : mode sucks. Most commands are short enough but
sometimes you need a longer piece of text as an argument somewhere. So
I thought that I would give an emacsitor a try. Given its edit
commands are key combos they could theoretically work in any mode. And
don't start about modeless editing. Some more advanced emacs commands
need arguments, and this puts you into a special mode.

The first thing I noticed is that counted movement commands aren't
present in emacsitors, or at least they are not basic enough to be
described in introductory documentation. On the other hand, the GNU
Emacs people describe the possibility to browse info pages from within
emacs as a cool feature. I completely missed the coolness of this
option. You certainly can do that but the key bindings for viewing an
info page are completely different from those for moving inside a text
buffer. So you can as well start the texinfo viewer in a different
terminal or in a subshell or background your editor. No need to do it
within your editor whatsoever.

In the end I also do use a real editor. I write my email in one
because the other option would be write-only email without the
possibility to reply to the email I am viewing. AFAIK there is no
usable email client that would also allow using an external editor. In
fact I do not know any usable specialized email client, the only thing
that seems to work is client-server solution with part of the email
reader sitting on a server, sending data to a generic client like a
web browser. Desktop environments somehow do not seem to be well
suited for massaging a multi-gigabyte database.

For short pieces of text it is manageable to use an editor. One needs
good mouse-fu and be careful not to type too many errors ...

Thanks

Michal