On Friday 11 November 2005 4:01 pm, Bruce Marshall wrote:
On Friday 11 November 2005 03:45 pm, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
d) You're on a strange or brand new *nix system. vi is almost always the only editor you can count on being there.
I believe that's the case in the SuSE rescue system, and it's unfortunate. There are other simple editors around and it wouldn't be hard to include one of them, but it's not something that I as a user can do.
vi is a standard of sorts... get used to it.
I agree that it's a standard, but it's an ill-chosen one. It wouldn't be all that hard for SuSE and others to include pico or some other more modern editor as well -- the space it takes is, I'm pretty sure, trivial. This is a case of tradition triumphing over rationality. For another example of obsolete tradition, look at the manpage of stty. Paul