Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>]

On Friday 11 November 2005 1:10 pm, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
> I was around in the early days of vee-eye (not "vie"), aka vi, and I've
> never liked it.  The fact that it's built on top of a truly horrendous
> line editor, ex, is a particularly unpleasant flaw, which shows itself in
> the need to use "ex" commands for many operations such as inserting one
> file within another.
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. 
In the Unix community there is the EMACS religion where Richard Stallman is 
the lord high prophet, and the VI religion where Bill Joy is the lord high 
prephet. I admit I pray to RMS every day and I am an EMACSIAN. But I also 
use vi. When I want to do a quick edit on a file, I'll still just vi the 
file do what I want and save it. In the old days, when starting up our 
systems, we would run emacs and stop it, then bring it back into the 
foreground when needed because it took forever to load. 
I did not start using Unix until about 1979, so I missed the first 3 years 
of vi, and I only live a few miles from RMS. 

But, going back to ex, it is not a flaw at all, it was a design feature. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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