Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Paul Cartwright <paul_tbot@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri November 11 2005 1:10 pm, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
> The particular bit of execrable human engineering in vi that bugs me
> the most is the mode dependence.  Vi is extraordinarily vulnerable
> to mistyping; a couple of wrong keystrokes in insert mode and you're
> in command mode where the text you're typing can just about wipe out
> your file.  
as with ANY file/folder/drive, backups are important.
every now and then, ef you are editing a LARGE file, it is always good 
to do a 
:w

then keep going. Or if you totally screw it up, a 
:e
to start over with the existing file. VI only does what it is told. 
Since I fat finger things alot, I learned these lessons years ago:)

> It's too bad that vi still occupies a prominent place 
> in Linux; as I remember it's the editor you need to use to modify
> the sudoers file (or maybe it's some other system file).  Even the
> DOS editors are better, and they can operate from a command line
> also --  
vi has colon commands ":" just like ED, and I use them often. There are 
no better DOS editors than VI, but we all have our opinions, and you 
are welcome to yours. That's exactly why there are so many editors out 
there to use. I personally don't like EMACS, but that's because I 
already learned VI.

-- 
Paul Cartwright
Registered Linux user # 367800
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