The End of the Editor Wars
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An interesting op-ed about the End of the Editor Wars, about how vi ended up triumphing over emacs in the end after decades of battling it out. An interesting piece for those who have been using UNIX for a few decades.
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In the case of vi vs Emacs yes, vi(m) has won, probably for three reasons:
- vi comes on everything remotely POSIX or Unix compliant
- Some people pride themselves on the overly complex nature of vi(m) over other editors, you can even find people swearing that vim with tons of weird extras is superior to a full IDE such as PhpStorm or Visual Studio. These people are liars, morons, or delusional.
- Emacs, in my experience, was always more bigger with people more apt to use Lisp, and nobody but supervirgins and beardos use Lisp. ((((know(((what((((((()()))))I((((((((((((mean? (Someone who just knows the basic syntax of Lisp should get that joke/insult).
Outside of the two short bus riders beating the hell out of each other in the Waffle House parking lot that is vi vs Emacs, there are tons of editors which do way better at everything in comparison, to either, but especially to vi, as vi does everything in the worst way possible.
In other words yes, vi won, but they're both still crap.
Even today distros like Ubuntu override things like visudo to load into nano, not into vi. I think this is wonderful. Vi comes from a time when there were limited keys on a keyboard, and instead of using escape and control to manage the program (used in a limited way, escape especially in that it brings up command mode), they devised a brutally complex and illogical system for editing which persists to this day, it is truly for the masochistic and pretentious.
Knowing the basics of vi in that knowing how to do basic editing and also how to escape+qw! or wq is important if you're a sysadmin, but unnecessary for everyone else, and as soon as you can install any other text editor, you should, and most people do.
I understand personal preference, but it says a lot about someone's personality in that they'd honestly say vim is better than a real IDE on X and they can work "faster" with it. That can only be an absolute lie or a delusion on a David Berkowitz level. The dog is barking at the vi masochists and it's saying "hold on to a turd and call it gold, after all, you'l gain +100 nerd points in the valley."
Dear moderator(s), feel free to edit out anything unseemly in my post, I still haven't gotten a hang of exactly the rules here yet, aside from know cussing. For those interested I did post a full colour extended version on my blog, I also linked back here too.
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Kind of on a rant today, aren't you @tonyshowoff ?
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@Dashrender said:
Kind of on a rant today, aren't you @tonyshowoff ?
Not really, my wife said she was tired of hearing me complain about things on the Internet, so now I'm just typing what I used to sit here and say outloud, shouting across the room.
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@tonyshowoff said:
@Dashrender said:
Kind of on a rant today, aren't you @tonyshowoff ?
Not really, my wife said she was tired of hearing me complain about things on the Internet, so now I'm just typing what I used to sit here and say outloud, shouting across the room.
LOL - I know that feeling...
