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cross
The Great Text-Editor Holy War Item. Mark Unseen   Apr 22 03:42 UTC 2007

Vi or emacs?  I prefer acme (under Plan 9, or ported to Unix) or TextMate
(under Mac OS X).

This is the great text-editor holy war item.  Best to testify in the name
here....
80 responses total.
mcnally
response 1 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 22 03:47 UTC 2007

 vim for me, unless I'm doing something very specialized.  
nharmon
response 2 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 22 12:52 UTC 2007

pico/nano because I'm lazy and haven't learned very much vi. :)
cross
response 3 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 22 16:19 UTC 2007

Remmers had a great post about this subject on M-Net; I'm hoping he will
repost that with context here.
kingjon
response 4 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 22 18:10 UTC 2007

Vim. I do need to learn Emacs sometime, if only to take advantage of the
Emacs-like features of the Bash shell, but I've already got an operating
system; I don't want one in my editor.
cross
response 5 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 23 03:32 UTC 2007

Here's a blog post on switching from emacs to TextMate on the Mac:

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2006/05/emacs_est_mort_vive_le_textmat_1
.ht
ml

The best line in it (regarding Emacs LISP): "Dont get me wrong, being fluent
in a programing language from 1958 gets me plenty of trim at parties."

Yea!
maus
response 6 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 23 06:18 UTC 2007

I prefer vi, because I am guaranteed to have the same base functionality
on UNIX, BSD, Linux, etc. I also like the fact that I don't hurt my
wrists trying to hold Esc+Shift+Control+K to make things happen. I also
don't like waiting longer for a text editor to start up than I do for a
full-blown GUI application like Gnumeric. Most of all, I learned vi
first, so I have an inherent bias towards it.
mcnally
response 7 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 23 16:16 UTC 2007

 There's apparently no truth to the canard that emacs was named as it is
 to be an acronym for "escape-meta-alt-control-shift".  But it should have
 been.
C-x C-c
cross
response 8 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 23 20:53 UTC 2007

Heh.  Emacs was actually originally a set of macros for the TECO text editor
on the DEC PDP series of machines.  It stood for Editor MACroS.
ball
response 9 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 23 20:56 UTC 2007

"joe" for me, because I'm from a CP/M background.

Does EMACS have Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q bound to functions in the
software?  If so, I think that qualifies Stallman as a
lunatic (in case anyone was left wondering ;-)
mcnally
response 10 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 23 22:16 UTC 2007

 re #9:  (regarding XOFF/XON -- nothing is bound to ^S, ^Q by default,
 so far as I know.  But it's not uncommon for people to customize emacs
 with a site-specific customization file that binds functions to those
 keys.  Obviously, though, that doesn't work well via a terminal session.
albaugh
response 11 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 23 22:18 UTC 2007

I use vi because I do UNIX/Linux based editing so infrequently that I'm not
going to be learning something better, and knowing vi is fairly transportable
to the various *x flavors.
maus
response 12 of 80: Mark Unseen   Apr 24 06:03 UTC 2007

To be fair, vi has its quirks as well. The last time I drank with a
friend from UT Austin, he put it very well: "vi has two modes: one which
beeps at me, and one which mangles my file". A mode-oriented editor
either requires you to set a bit in your brain for which mode it is in,
or be prepared to hit Esc button before doing anything to know with some
certainty which mode you are in. 

Oh, and be prepared to retrain your br@n3 when coming back to windows.
Apparently Notepad does not care much for trying to end a file by typing
"Esc :wq", though the version I had when I had that trouble was nice
enough to beep at me, just like vi. 
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