On Friday 11 November 2005 2:29 pm, Simon Roberts wrote:
2) vi allows editing of files that include non-printing characters. That's nothing special, but many "pure" text editors don't give you any mechanism to insert control codes. This is really not something you'll need often, and even if you do, vi is not the only editor capable of this, just one of them. As does EMACS. And, I agree.
One of the real beauties of Unix and Linux is that virtually every
configuration file is text and may be edited with just about any text
editor, even notepad running under WINE.
Essentially, Bill Joy and associates wanted a better editor and wrote one.
On the East Coast, Stallman wrote EMACS in 1975 as a set of macros around
the TECO editor.
http://www.softpanorama.org/Editors/humor.shtml
It has been written, that on the day of the Great Editor War, the peace
is shattered by an unprovoked attack by nvi on Emacs. Emacs strikes
back, sending viper out to annihilate vile, while repelling the continued
attacks from nvi without sweat, until XEmacs and jed join forces in
another attack on Emacs. Emacs is crushed, but XEmacs is seriously
wounded in the battle, and unable to defend itself when Crisp, XCoral,
and nedit all attacks at the same time. Meanwhile, jed, although less
severely harmed from the battle, find itself facing a formidable opposition
in the form of µEmacs, mg, joe, freemacs, and notGNU, who all join the
battle now. nvi, now with perl as an extension language, tries to claim
the now vacant title as The Mother of All Editors, but is immediately
attacked by vim, elvis, sam, and wily.
The battle continues, drawing in more and more editors, even obscure
presumed dead editors like xedit, teco, and tpu/edt, until finally a single
survivor emerges, pico, which has meanwhile been bought by Bill Gates,
renamed to MS Edit, and stripped for all the advanced features that just
confused the users.
So the answer, my friend, is to learn pico now and get rich on
consulting once MS Edit becomes the accepted industry standard.
--
Jerry Feldman