Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!oliveb!pyramid!prls!philabs!ttidca!kevin
From: kevin@ttidca.TTI.COM (Kevin Carothers)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: Reformatting in vi
Message-ID: <1806@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Date: 29 Jan 88 07:17:43 GMT
References: <1988Jan19.102343.3255@nonvon.uucp> <1723@ttidca.TTI.COM> <1726@ttidca.TTI.COM> <3774@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Reply-To: kevin@ttidcb.tti.com (Kevin Carothers)
Distribution: na
Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica
Lines: 41


>While it's true that vi gets a lot of bad (read "undeserved") press, I would
>*not* consider this a shining example of its power.  In GNU Emacs, one moves
>the point into the paragraph to be filled (assuming fill-mode is on), and
>types ESC q to reformat the paragraph.  *No* blank lines are inserted.


Well. Forgive me if I'm adding to the  noise  ratio  on  the
net, but if I may discuss what I think about vi's "power".

One thing that makes vi "powerful" on UNIX is that  it's  as
closely  coupled  with  UNIX as "csh".  That is, whether one
decides to format with "nroff", "fmt", or his/her  own  text
pre-processor,  it's  totally  possible,  and just a command
line away. For instance.  If you want to  find the number of
lines between two marks in a file,  you can use unix to find 
it for you, like;
                              :'a,'bw !wc -l


Sure, a lot of text editors have a feature or two  for  mas-
saging  a  paragraph or a margin. But  it's about useless if
it's not *exactly* what you need/want. Why have a  bunch  of
paragraph  formatters  around  when  mastery of one would be
much more desireable?  The beauty of  vi  that I  stress  to
people  who  don't  learn  it  (or don't think they have the
patience to) is that you can  take advantage of  just  about
everything UNIX has to offer *INSIDE* the editor.

Maybe that's possible with EMACS, or what have you, but  not
all  systems  I've  worked on have EMACS, JOVE, Rand "e", or
whatever.  I think (...just my opinion  mind  you)  that  an
understanding  of  vi is as necessary as an understanding of
shell programming to have a good knowledge of how UNIX works
(...time to get my asbestos 3-pc suite).



Kevin


:wq!