[ale] [EXTERNAL] Re: Time for this Grey Beard to stir up some stuff

[Allen Beddingfield]

This is pretty much exactly my situation.  I've been doing Linux/Unix sysadmin work for a couple of decades.  When I started, I was coming in with DOS, OS/2, and Netware experience, so I was used to an editor similar to what was available there.  The first time I opened vi, I had to kill my session to get out of it, and I used pico for a while.  Finally, I slowly picked up enough vi to move over to that for basic work.  Over 20 years later, and I still pretty much know the very basics of vi.  For anything complex, I break out  my old sed and awk book.  One of my co-workers is an emacs user, but he is also the type of guy who pretty much has all the command line options for must utilities committed to memory, and uses perl instead of bash shell scripts.
Allen B.

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Allen Beddingfield
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The University of Alabama
Office 205-348-2251
allen at ua.edu


________________________________________
From: Ale <ale-bounces at ale.org> on behalf of Jim Kinney via Ale <ale at ale.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2021 6:13 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts; Chuck Payne via Ale; Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!
Cc: Jim Kinney
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [ale] Time for this Grey Beard to stir up some stuff

Vi/vim. I'm a sysadmin. When the system was in run level 1 with next to nothing mounted and/or working, vi was available. Busybox used to only have vi.

Ok. I started with pico. When I realized I was writing my perl code to get around the line length limit in pico was when I changed.

I see all these fancy things for vi/vim environment settings and I don't use them. I found that relying on a cool setting meant an emergency had my hands tied behind my back right when I need to be at the top of my game.

20+ years in vi and I still maneuver around like a newbie. Basic editing and block cut and paste and save to a new file name are the bulk operations.

The array of settings coders can use with vim are really amazing. It's also making sure they are only useful with that config. Maybe it's just me being lazy but the basic setup starting in RedHat v3.1 has JustWorked everytime.

I felt arthritic when I tried emacs. But I know people that can fly with it. Charles Shapiro is one in particular. I'm pretty slow outside of my burst mode. If I screw up, I run a risk of crashing out someone else's career off a bad command.

On May 26, 2021 4:56:31 PM EDT, Chuck Payne via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
Good Afternoon my fellow Grey Beards,

So I have noticed that more and more post teaching people to do stuff with config or anything on the CLI, are using nano.

Why in Gods name would you teach them that. Is VI or VIM so hard. I gave up on Emacs ( My first editor by the way ) years ago, but if you worked on FreeBSD, you had vi. If you worked on Solaris, you had vi. Linux has vi.

I have come to love VIM, I do most of my edits in vim. I enjoy color syntax in vim.

I get the joke that exit is hard if you don't know how to do :q! or :wq, but Emacs was so much harder with crtl-x something, something.

Anyway, every time I see nano, I want to scream, "You kids don't know anything. Get a real editor."

People who don't know the magic of doing things like %norm $T.D, to delete everything after the period. Or the beauty of using sed to find and replace. Truly are missing out.

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