A reason to at least know *how* to use vi(m)

[snarkout]

Regardless of your religious convictions, vi is on every single unix and unix-like os I have ever used, emacs is not.

I had to stifle a belly laugh today when the emacs bigot "linux expert" who works where I do (to say I work "with" him would be a stretch) came in and asked how to save a file in vi, and then bugged the sysadmin for several minutes about installing emacs on all of our servers.

Emacs may well be the best text-editor in the known universe, but if your addiction to it cripples you, there's something wrong. Hell, use pico if vi is too "arcane" for you...

[Jza]

ajamm... RTFM, no seriously, vimtutor is there for a reason, for laizy people that don want to go allt hru documentation. But really if people dont read that and go to forums well you just force people of the forum and copy past that same documentation u didnt want to read on the first place.

Emacs is great, and you should use it, that is unless u dont want to use it. But the same applies anywhere else, thats the goodness of free software, is tehre for you whenever you need it even if its not installed by default.

If you dont like BASH and you are a Korn, or CSH guy cuz u think C is for real men. Hey more power to you. So yeah if you are used to Emacs I dont see why not installed on every single piece of moving part in the whole building, including the toilet, typewriters and paper basket.

I dont think that just because is the default you should use it, that wasnt the point of free software to begin with. And if its the first time you used emacs you will be acting the same way and maybe u dont want people to belly laugh at you either.

[mrben]

The ubiquity of vi (or at least a vi command that points to an editor that, 90% of the time, uses vi keybindings) is one of the things that made me learn it.

Most of the time I use gvim and the menus help out, but I get by on the CLI too, and have been very glad of it.

[doublejoon]

nano comes default on a lot of systems too....very easy to use if you are not used to vi ,emacs etc...

[thetza]

It really depends on what you do; if you're a sysadmin, obviously you should know and love vi because its always there, its always the same, its lightning fast (if you've ever started emacs on a sparcstation you know what I'm talking about).

If you're do most of your work on a single machine, productivity should be the #1 factor. If emacs (and its carpel-tunnel-inducing 12 finger key combinations) makes you productive, so be it. Your boss doesn't care what the hell you edt text with.