[thelist] real men code by hand...

Simon Willison cs1spw at bath.ac.uk
Tue Mar 19 04:17:01 CST 2002


Ed Shuck wrote:

>I some time ago attended meetings of the San Francisco PHP user group.  One
>member, in fact, used VI as the editor of choice.  He is a pro.  His code is
>wonderful.  But to me it seems a bit like root canal without anastetic.
>
Vi (or rather Vim) is actually an incredibly powerful editor. It has a
huge set of features (regular expressions, folding, buffers, syntax
highlighting, the ability to customise it) but as you observed getting
started with it is a nightmare. I'd love to be able to say I use Vi, but
the truth is I stick with UltraEdit as all of Vi's bizzare keyboard
commands make me dizzy :( It's definitely worth learning as it seems to
come as standard on pretty much every *nix box out there and it's just
as usable from a terminal as it is in a windowing system - it's just a
shame the learning curve is so daunting...




More information about the thelist mailing list