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Re: Your opinion on using other people's work

Chuck Harris
 

It was never a question of "not being sure" what mode
I was in, but rather one of "being sure" and being wrong.

It is simply very tiring to have to keep toggling back
and forth in the modes. It reminds me of working with
ed... which is what vi is: ed with a screen interface.

Given the choice between using vi or ed, I would rather
just use ed.

Most companies are very concerned about software that
exists beyond what their IT departments have installed
for every user. So, if they have installed vi, they
often won't allow a foreign editor, even if it is installed
in user space.

When I am repairing crashed systems, I am root and I can do
whatever I want. It has never made sense to me to use a
badly broken system to fix itself, so I use a "live" disk,
and my live disks always have the tools I will need, and
one of them is always jove.

If forced to use vi by the paucity of tools, or by force,
I will use vi. I fully understand it, but still hate it.

For me using vi is like pounding nails in my head. Sure
I could do that, but why would I want to?

-Chuck Harris



Mark Wendt wrote:

On 04/04/2018 12:28 PM, Chuck Harris wrote:
I used to love it when a customer would insist that
I use vi at their shop. Since I was paid by the hour,
it would easily add a few thousand bucks to the cost
of the job by slowing me down.

The thing that turned me off vi was the way you had
to flip-flop between modes. I found that through a
typing error, or forgetfulness, I could easily get
into command mode, and completely destroy several
hours of work by touch typing text into the command
mode window.

I have never found it all difficult to find a copy
of jove (a light weight emacs clone) for any system
I have ever worked on... including windows.

-Chuck Harris
Strange they would force you to use their text editor to do your programming. All
the places I ever worked where we programmed for Unix we were allowed to use our
editor of choice. Be that as it may, jove is a good editor too. But it runs into
the same issue as emacs (or xemacs) when trying to repair a broken system. It's
generally loaded on a partition that doesn't get mounted in single user mode, or
there may be problems with that partition during boot. If the system boots to single
user mode, vi is always available while other editors may not be. If you're not sure
what mode you are in, hitting the esc key a couple of times will get you back to the
vi mode. As a sysadmin, vi is part of your basic toolbox.

Mark
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