Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Why? vi isn't even the default editor on many Linux distributions anymore.

I'm serious, not trying to be an ass here:

Is emacs?

It seems to me that both religions are not 'standard' anymore. I tend to see pico, nano, joe etc. - occasionally vi (but not vim).

"Ed is the standard text editor."

Ed really is worth learning, if only the basics. No matter where you end up, ed should be around. Even if you find yourself logged on to a Plan 9 box via telnet or something, ed will be there. Plus, the commands transfer to vi, and the ed command language is essentially the same as the sed command language! (and the Sam command language, used in the sam and acme editors, but those aren't as popular :)

Real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.

Real programmers use a hand drill.

I knew a guy who actually did this - he worked for a company that maintained process control systems for "serious" customers (steel mills, nuclear power stations). One steel plant had some ancient mainframe controlling things and it originally booted from paper tape that had long since worn out in the eons since it was installed and been replaced with a sturdy leather belt.

He had to patch the boot code - so hence had to resort to a handdrill to drill some new holes in the leather belt.

That would be an amazingly awesome writeup.

Reference: http://xkcd.com/378/

Excuse me, but real programmers use butterflies.

It is on Debian and CentOS server installs and is available on a Ubuntu default install. It's the common denominator.

Why frig around with emacs, pico, nano etc when vi is always there and is the same?

The Debian base system comes with both vim-tiny and nano. Nano is the default; when the installer wants you to edit something, you get nano:

    $ ls -l ./etc/alternatives/editor
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep  7 06:19 ./etc/alternatives/editor -> /bin/nano

If you want to use vim for development, use vim. But "it's the default" is simply an untrue statement. Vim (-full) is no more "the default" than Emacs. Both need to be manually installed on nearly every operating system.

(OpenBSD ships with both nvi and mg, FWIW.)

I'm pretty sure its vim-tiny

Please substitute "vi" in my comments for "vi or appropriate compatible substitute" such as nvi, vim, elvis etc. They all work the same with the usual subset of commands :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com