On 16 Feb 2021 at 12:18:41 GMT, Pancho 
wrote:

> On 16/02/2021 11:01, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>  On 16/02/2021 10:56, Pancho wrote:
>>>  On 16/02/2021 10:39, Nikolaj Lazic wrote:
>>>>  Dana Tue, 16 Feb 2021 09:28:39 +0000, Joe  napis'o:
>>>>>  On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 08:17:53 -0000 (UTC)
>>>>>  Nikolaj Lazic  wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>  Dana Tue, 16 Feb 2021 02:24:59 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
>>>>>>   napis'o: [snip]
>>>>>>>  But what do you mean by 'editor'
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>  I wouldn't use it to write a book in.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  Why not?
>>>>>>  Even vim is enought to write any book in LaTeX.
>>>>>
>>>>>  You could probably do that in Edlin.
>>>>>
>>>>>  But there's a big difference between 'enough' and 'I would use it by
>>>>>  preference'.
>>>>
>>>>  But I do prefere vim and I do prefere LaTeX for anything that needs to
>>>>  look right... as a proper document or a book.
>>>>  And yes, I do prefere keyboard over mouse. :) It's faster!
>>>>
>>>
>>>  Yes, we all know a proper vi user uses h j k l instead of cursors, so
>>>  they don't move their fingers from the touch typing default position.
>>>
>>>  Back in 1995 the team I worked on was allowed to switch c++
>>>  development from unix/vi to the Microsoft C++ IDE, pretty much
>>>  everyone switched.
>>>
>>  back in the day we could either edit in vi on the PDP 11, or use
>>  wordstar on DOS and upload the code for compilations. I don't think
>>  anyone worked in vi from choice except for minor mods.
>>  I cant remember how we uploaded the code either - there was certainly no
>>  TCP/IP - must have been over serial.
>
> One of the guys I worked with wrote an emacs like editor for DEC, when
> we moved from VMS to ultrix/sparcs he used vi, even after he got a unix
> port of his editor.
>
> The funny thing coding full time with vi is that my fingers didn't
> forget it even after decades of not using it. I found it hard to
> verbalise the keys I was using but my fingers just seemed to know.

Daer oh dear. Hopeless, isn't it. I remember - and it must be 30 years ago now
- when the Lab I worked at got a few unix machines. I was given an Ultrix box
and told to get on with doing something with it. So I started to use it for
network monitoring using SNMP.

Previously, most of us had been using editors that made various uses of ASCII
terminals - Ann Arbor Ambassadors mostly that could give you 43 lines on the
screen and pretend to be full-screen by using cursor addressing.

So everyone assumed we'd continue doing much the same, and the debate turned
onto which editor everyone would be trained to use under unix. Would it be vi,
emacs, jove, something else. I got bored waiting for this debate to conclude,
then found the Ultrix box had dxnotepad. So I spent 5 minutes learning how to
use a mouse-based editor, and got on with writing large amounts of C. Six
months later I found that the debate about which editor to use had made no
progress, so I carried on using dxnotepad, which although not a patch on
something like BBedit, was still better than any ASCII-terminal-based junk,
all of which is obsolete. Why are they obsolete? Because they are bad tools.
They require you to remember stuff just to use them. Even vi has a manual that
is 127 pages long. A *manual*? For a fucking *editor*? What are these guys
smoking?

--
Tim

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05