Why vi?

[John_Doh]

I have been a *nix user for about 3 years, but i have never bothered to learn how to use vi. As a newbie pico was much easier, and i have never used any other editors since (except ee on FreeBSD). Yes, i know pico isnt "l33t", but it works without knowing a ton of obscure commands. And yes, i also know that vi is the default editor on most *nix systems.
But except for that, why should i go through the hassle to learn to use or vi or any of the clones like vim?

Please dont turn this into a vi/vim/emacs/pico etc. flamewar ;-)

[ 04 April 2001: Message edited by: John_Doh ]

[Shadoglare]

Main reason I bothered to learn it is because it's really the only editor that you are pretty much *guaranteed* to have, no matter what *nix system you are on.

[cga]

If you do not need vi, and if you don't want to learn it, you don't have to.

However, vi and clones are very, very powerful editors, even if you only learn a handful of the common commands. I use vi and vim for darn near everything, including editing large documents.

Really, it is not that hard to learn.

[TaeShadow]

It may be a hassle to learn vi, but it's much faster to use than pico once you learn it. As far as emacs goes, it's a different kind of editor and has its own purposes.

[StanLin]

I use vi because pico cannot handle the 81st or more character. A good example is editing /etc/fstab although Linux is not really fussy about lining up columns in this particular case. But its neater with vi.

[tachyonism]

'joe' is much much better than pico, and I can edit anything even /etc/fstab without any failures.

[bdg1983]

If you don't bother learn vi, don't! I haven't, either... and I've also used Linux for about 3 yrs! I like jed. Yeah, it isn't 1337 but it's simple and easy to use and I can edit fstab without any big headache. For bigger things I use Emacs, though, but jed and Emacs can have same key bindings... yay!

Well, it is a fact that vi is the only editor that surely will be installed in any *nix so maybe it would be good to learn at least some basics. I know the very very basic things - how to edit and save a file in vi, just in case something horrible happens, but I've never bothered to learn more.

[YaRness]

i used to code with pico and notepad-type text editors in unix visual environments. but then i found vim and syntax highlighting... drool.

but if you don't need to code (or code much), then you really don't need to bother learning vi. but it IS a powerful tool to be able to use.

[Gnu/Vince]

I used to hate vi mainly because I couldn't use it. But one day I found a startup cheat in a french magazine. After I knew the basic, I kindda liked vi, so I downloaded vim. I ran through vimtutor twice and then I began using it. It seemed like I was 3x faster. Then I found a couple of nice things (auto-indent, cindent, syntax highlighting, visual mode, etc.) Never been interested in learning anything else after that

[mindwarp.out]

On a side note, pico can handle 80+ columns. Try typing 'man pico' next time. (People are using vi before they even know the man command now adays..)

pico -w somefile

Mindwarp

[bdg1983]

Syntax highlighting? Jed has it.

[bdg1983]

'vi' is certainly not my prefered means of editing a file. For simple changes (as I use it for) you cannot beat vi. Not all distros come with pico or some other the others I've seen mentioned.

And as already said, you are certain to have vi on any *nix system. You might as well learn the few simple commands to do a quick edit.

[Molecule Man]

I prefer joe, but recently learned that a simple debian install only had vi and emacs, at least as far as I could find. It is tough trying to learn Vi on the fly when you are trying to fix something.

[FoBoT]

i normally get by using pico

but i am hacking/testing a new hardware appliance from toshiba, runs rh 6.1 and no pico to be found :(

so i read the nhf by x_console "vi crash course" and was able to make the needed changes to smb.conf

always good to learn more stuff! :)