response 28 of 80:

Jun 15 22:39 UTC 2007

I'm surprised that WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS cannot produce RTF.

At any rate, both vi and emacs have macro capabilities.  Given that you are
a frequent pico user, I'd suggest emacs as being philosophically closer.

response 30 of 80:

Jun 16 15:18 UTC 2007

RTF no, but TeX yes.

response 32 of 80:

Jun 21 14:29 UTC 2007

My Lithuanian friend put together a minimal tex package and also recommends
the above pdf guide  (2MB), which is also available in dvi form (1MB) and as
'src.tar.gz' (200K) - tex?  Or 3MB ps.  He included tex, tex.fmt, dvips, and
some fonts.  I suggested also dvilj in case I want to print - not much use
for ps.  He made another pdftex package, and an xdvi package for viewing in
X, but suggested a couple of svgalib viewers (tmview).  I am looking at
dviware programs - dvilj4 dvipng dvivga (?).   dvilj4 is supposed to also work
with LJIIIP and maybe also plain LJ (which should include deskjets that
support PCL3?).  dvivga is a previewer that supports VGA and seems to need
PK fonts (which he included).  THere is also an
'epson' (printer driver?), a laserjet (that needs PXL fonts), tmview (works
in framebuffer, svgalib, or X),xdvi (this is a large one), dvidjc for deskjet
500 series, catdvi to convert to plain text, dvipdf....

response 34 of 80:

Jun 26 21:45 UTC 2007

I use "cat > FILENAME" because I never make mistakes.

response 36 of 80:

Jun 27 05:14 UTC 2007

Regarding #34; Under Plan 9, the window system is responsible for most of
the traditional character handling and so on usually done by the line
discipline in the TTY subsystem in Unix.  Plan 9 has no TTY interface:
you're either on the console, in which case you have a bitmap display,
keyboard, and mouse, or you're on a UART, where you have something else.  In
either case, it is expected that some other piece of code will handle
dealing with your input and any special treatment that it needs.  e.g.,
translating Del into an interrupt note sent to the currently running process
group (similar to ^C generating a SIGINT that is sent to the current session
leading process group for that TTY under Unix).  There is no notion of
POSIX-style sessions, job control, or any of the rest of it (and believe me;
the kernel internals for the TTY subsystem under Unix are incredibly
complex, arguably more so than any other subsystem).

However, one neat feature of this is that the window system ends up getting
the opportunity to handle a lot more than just generating the native
equivalent of signals, and in the current implementation, input to processes
running in a window is entirely managed by the window system.  All text in
such a window is editable, and for each window there is a notion of an
`output point' at which text is inserted by the window system, presumably
after being output by whatever programs are running in that window.  Text
entered by the user (or by pasting) after the output point is sent as input
to the process currently running in the window when a newline is
encountered.  Text entered or modified *before* the output point is not sent
anywhere, but remains visible in the window.  Cutting, pasting, command line
editing, etc, is thus all handled by the window system transparently to
whatever is running in the window.

Furthermore, typing Esc in the window puts that window into `hold mode,' in
which no text will be sent to any processes running in the window until Esc
is typed again (returning the window to normal mode).  Hence, `cat > file'
followed by Esc and whatever text you want, editted as you like, followed by
Esc again and then ^D makes a very effective text editor for short files
under Plan 9 (assuming you're using the window system).

And it's even cooler than that.  The window system (and indeed, the entire
graphics subsystem) exports a filesystem interface using the standard Plan 9
file protocol (9P).  This can be imported and mounted over a network,
providing network transparency for the window system, but without the need
for a special protocol ala X11.  In fact, each window has a little
filesystem that it exports, so you can import only a single window, or the
entire thing, or any combination anywhere else on the network.  You get all
the authentication, encryption, etc of the underlying network protocol built
into the window system for free.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/

response 38 of 80:

Jun 27 13:03 UTC 2007

Heh.

response 40 of 80:

Jun 28 03:38 UTC 2007

Yeah, I've heard some pretty good things about Domain/OS, but never used it.
My understanding was that it was heavily influenced (if not outright inspired)
by Multics.

response 42 of 80:

Jun 28 17:26 UTC 2007

AFS did something similar.  Plan 9 got that right by having per-process
namespaces that were mutable by the user.  You could, e.g., bind /$cputype/bin
onto /bin and all your executables would appear to be under /bin, and would
be of the correct type.

response 44 of 80:

Aug 22 16:43 UTC 2007

resp:12: That made me laugh out loud.  I consider myself reasonably
proficient at vi, but I still routinely manage to do things like insert
27 copies of the letter "a" because I forgot which mode I'm in.

I recently started using Emacs, mostly xemacs.  (Before this I was
pretty rigidly wedded to "joe.")  It's the "official" supported editor
for the department I'm working in, so I figured I'd better learn it. 
I've actually become fond of it quite quickly, mostly because its
syntax-highlighting and automatic indenting are light-years ahead of
anything else I've used.

response 46 of 80:

Aug 22 23:08 UTC 2007

Er, vim? By default it has syntax highlighting (provided the terminal supports
it) and displays the current mode.

response 48 of 80:

Aug 22 23:33 UTC 2007

Yeah, it has it too.  Personally, I don't like autoindenting of any kind, but
that's why this is `The Great Text-Editor Holy War Item.'

response 50 of 80:

Aug 23 09:47 UTC 2007

Re #48:  Besides helping to make code readable with less work on my
part, I also like auto-indenting because it helps catch syntax errors. 
E.g. if I omit a terminating semicolon, the next line isn't indented as
I expect, making the error immediately obvious.

Re #49:  Okay, I tried that with vim; had to have the line "set
nocompatible" as well to get it to work.  Seems to auto-indent
intelligently, but I'd have to do more playing around to see if it's as
smart about it as emacs.  For instance, does it know about comments?

response 52 of 80:

Aug 23 14:10 UTC 2007

Absolutely.  Why don't you care for auto-indenting?