Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!tsdiag!ocpt!pechter From: pechter@ocpt.ccur.com (Bill Pechter ) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Real Time UNIX (was: Re: How do you tell a wizard?) Summary: Vi's difficult to learn Message-ID: <17@ocpt.ccur.com> Date: 12 Nov 89 13:51:34 GMT References: <17150@rpp386.cactus.org> <8000001@hpopd.HP.COM> <10072@ucsd.Edu> <2808@convex.UUCP> Organization: CONCURRENT COMPUTER CORP. OCEANPORT NJ Lines: 38 In article <2808@convex.UUCP>, thurlow@convex.com (Robert Thurlow) writes: > doug@herbert.uucp (Doug Phillipson 5-0134) writes: > >People say that vi is expert friendly but it is no harder to learn > >than WordPerfect. Word Perfect is one of the hardest PC editors to learn. It's certainly a bad example if you're trying to prove your point. > > I use 'vi' daily, and while I won't be without it and don't care much > for most Emacsen, I'll never say 'vi' is easy to learn. I've just > watched too many people struggle with it. It's not so bad if you have > a good model of what an editor does, and just need to pick up the ways > THIS editor does things, but it's a fright to a novice. Of course, it > *is* a programmers editor ... > > I'd love an inteface more like WPS on the old PDP-8 - it worked much > better. EDT and LSE were one of the easier things to pick up when I > did a VAX/VMS project awhile ago ... > Agreed. WordStar, EDT and Ked fall short on some things -- but all are easier to learn than vi. I'm going to get Small-EDT up on my Unix boxes as soon as I can get the code moved from MS-DOS. The one good thing about vi is (like edlin on MS-DOS) is it's a standard across the Unix arena and it will let you work immediately on any machine running Unix. Bill -- Bill Pechter -- Home - 103 Governors Road, Lakewood, NJ 08701 (201)370-0709 Work -- Concurrent Computer Corp., 2 Crescent Pl, MS 172, Oceanport,NJ 07757 Phone -- (201)870-4780 Usenet . . . rutgers!pedsga!tsdiag!scr1!pechter ** MS-DOS is CP/M on steroids, bigger, bulkier and not much better **