[mythtv-users] OFF TOPIC: Text Editor(s) ?

Nick Rout nick.rout at gmail.com
Fri Nov 15 04:13:50 UTC 2013


On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 4:43 PM, David Coburn <david.coburn at gmail.com> wrote:
> As  you can tell, you've opened a can of worms.  Like they said, it was
> probably vi.  I learned vi many years ago when I first started working with
> Unix.  I went to a lot of customer sites, and it was the only reasonable
> editor you could guarantee finding.  Today you could get by just learning
> emacs, I suspect, but vi is still my favorite.  Here's what looks to be an
> OK source for learning it: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/helpdocs/vi.html.
>

Man I remember the first few times I installed Free|Open BSD. A
default shell that wasn't bash, and a default editor of vi. To change
shell there was a strict imprimatur to use chsh or you might end up in
a scene from the walking dead, or similar trouble. chsh dumped into vi
- but how the f*** was I supposed to get out of vi? This was my only
computer so couldn't hop on another one to look up the internet.

At least I could change to another terminal and kill vi, but that just
got you back to square 1.

So the ability to get out of vi is the first skill to learn!

At the commandline I use mc a lot, which lands me in mcedit, which is
easy because there is a list of commands at the bottom of the screen,
and the defaults are similar to mc itself. It also has colour syntax
highlighting. Delightfully it lands the cursor at the last edit point
for that file.


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