Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

["Paul W. Abrahams" <abrahams@xxxxxxx>]

On Friday 11 November 2005 1:50 pm, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> Bill Joy wrote vi in 1976. It was not built on top of ex. Vi is a modal 
> editor. Ex is one of the modes of vi that provides a high degree of 
> compatibility to ex. A person who is familiar with ed, can use vi and just 
> learn some of the basic visual commands, but when something needed to be 
> done, such as search and replace, then the ex mode was easy because it was 
> syntactically similar to ed. 

I don't think of "ex" as a mode in vi, because each ex command has to be 
invoked separately with the ":" prefix (in command mode, of course).  The 
insert/command modes persist until you switch to the other one.  "ex", by the 
way, stands for "extended editor" because it was supposed to be an extension 
of ed.

Vi was an achievement in its time, but its design was dictated by the 
terminals available when it was written.  My argument against vi now is that 
terminal technology has advanced enormously and has made editing modes 
possible that weren't practicable when vi was written.

> I admit I pray to RMS every day and I am an EMACSIAN.

I'm an emacsian too (or an Emacsian, to use RMS's preferred capitalization).  
I still find the Emacs directory mode the easiest way to do most file 
operations, even under KDE.   And my desktop includes a "root emacs" icon for 
running Emacs with root privileges.

Paul