Hi Fred,
That's one of the GREAT things about Linux......you have a choice as to what tool you'll use! Vi is "poison" to some, and manna to others. ;)
... I absolutely agree. vi (sorry) sucks for non command line folks and newbies. Learning vi is actually so hard that O'Reilly felt it was even worth publishing a fat book about it. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/vi6/reviews.html For me it has many advantages, tho. At work, beside a crappy winclown PC that often crashes (well, not really surprising, eh? ;-))) there's a Linux PC to do the server based work. I work as an Oracle DBA and there are loads of servers out there, mostly HP and Sun machines but the number of Linux machines is increasing. Given these machines and the fact that there's no GUI there to log into vi has one common advantage: vi is always there, no matter what Unix-type machine you have. It's small, fast, powerful and can edit huge files. It's lets one recover edited files even when crashed due to network problems or whatever. Learning vi is a pain in the ass, yes. But having gone thru this, I must say it's pretty rewarding. I'm not a vi expert but can use it pretty well by now. Combining vi with the copy/paste functionality of a shell window does most GUI tricks most people need anyway. Still, I use the Learning vi book as a reference now and then. vi is definitely _not_ the editor of choice for GUI folks, tho. But then, the editor of choice is another philosophical thing... -- cul8er Paul paul.foerster@gmx.net