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vi :-)
From: "'Rick Moen' via BerkeleyLUG" <berkeleylug@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Assisting Elise S with editing grub.cfg
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2020 23:16:13 -0700
benefits
greatly from mastering the core features of a very capable but
fundamentally basic, general-purpose editor that is reliably present
everywhere the sysadmin can expect to need to be productive (i.e., all
*ix machines). It just happened to be vi that filled that niche. vi's
value lay not in being insanely great; that value lay in being both
capable and fully available in its core feature set on all systems of
interest.
Naw. ;-) vi(1) is insanely great! :-) It's THE best text editor.
It does exactly what it's supposed to do, and highly efficiently so,
no more*, no less. It's pretty lean for what it does, helluva lot
smaller than EMACS (but emacs will also make you a fruit smoothie,
but that's bloat, not text editing), and a reasonably true vi(1)
such as nvi - which is also the vi on BSD ... is even a heck of
a lot smaller (by about a factor of 10) than vim, because, well,
vim ... adds a whole lot 'o cruft that goes way beyond
text editing.
*Well, other than standard Unix philosophy - not only do well that which
you do, and don't add other cruft, but most notably also, play well with
others ... input/output, writing files - simple text format, getting
data in and out (reading from files, commands, writing to files, commands,
taking line(s) within buffer - one, all, or any contiguous set,
running them through a program and replacing those lines with the
output of program (shell, perl, sed, awk, sort, spell, ... whatever you
want).
So, yes, vi(1) ... highly standardized
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi.html
on most any *nix system,
and exceedingly well optimized for use at editing text,
and even more so generally in the context of Unix or the like
(Linux, BSD, ...).
Mmmm... yummy:
http://www.mpaoli.net/~michael/unix/vi/
vim? Meh. Can mostly coerce it to do the job of vi,
but often pretty dang annoying:
http://www.mpaoli.net/~michael/linux/vim/vim_annoyances.txt
Yeah, vim mostly slows down those that are highly to exceedingly
experienced with vi by ... well, ... not behaving in nearly as closely
the customary expected behavior of vi. Among vim's many
faults, it's not nearly keystroke-for-keystroke compatible
with vi ... and yeah, I know, it has a "compatible" mode ...
it's still not very compatible. But for those not so
familiar with vi, they might mostly never know the difference,
and vim will still allow one to do the basic vi editing functions,
not not behaving and responding in quite (and certainly not exactly)
the same ways.
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