[vox-tech] Re: First impressions of Slackware 10.0 (Hi, Bill!)

[Margo Schulter]

Quoting Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>:

> When you have time, and if you're still doing vi
> experimentation, do have a look at Vim (Vi IMproved, by Bram
> Moolenaar).  On the minus side, it's larger, and has some
> extensions that aren't wholly compatible with original vi.
> (":set cp" enables compatibility mode, in which vim is
> bug-for-bug compatible with nvi.  ":set nocp" turns on Vim
> extensions.)  On the plus side, it has many improvements.  (I'm
> a vim fan.)

Hi, there, and thanks for the tip about the neat e-mail feature
in Elvis if a session get interrupted with an open file. I can
confirm that I haven't seen this on DOS, even in GNU Emacs or
other DJGPP ports <grin>. As for Vim, I am interested in this as
well as Elvis, and would like to install it once I migrate this
system to an ext3 filesystem. The problem is that my UMSDOS
partition (hda5) is only 256M, and I need to be a bit selective
about what I install there.

> Depending on your background with prior editors, you might like
> jstar (WordStar keybindings), which is actually the WordStar
> emulation mode of "joe" (Joe's Own Editor).
> http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man1/jstar.1.html

This is included in the basic ZipSlack set, and I'd like to try
it (maybe tonight). What I'm using right now is Jed, which I
chose for two reasons: it emulates Emacs, which is mostly what
I'm used to for basic text editing as well as programming; and
it has an Info reader. To me, GNU Info files are a high form of
civilization, and they might tend to have a calming effect if I
run into problems <grin>. When I get that native Linux
filesystem set up, I'll also get GNU Emacs and Texinfo (staples
for me in DJGPP); for now, Jed seems a more or less reasonable
fascimile.

> Any vi will have a steep learning curve.  The gain is that you can be
> assured that it'll always available in some variant on any *ix system,
> and thus you'll always be able to do basic administration, there.  Thus,
> sysadmins often gravitate towards vi.  Coders often gravitate towards
> emacs, as it is a comfortable environment for pretty much all coder
> tasks.

Yes, I've often used Emacs for things like coding music scores
(abc2ps) or tuning and MIDI sequence files (Scala), as well as
PostScript. Now it's interesting to see the sysadmin side of
things; also, vi seems a basic staple of UNIX culture. There's
a fascinating interview with Bill Joy about vi from _Unix
Review_ in August 1984 available on the Web at one of the sites
on VI -- just 20 years ago -- that I found after reading your
reply:

        <http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html>

Thanks for your encouragement and advice, which adds zest to a
Linux newbie's excitement.

Most appreciatively,

Margo
mschulter at calweb.com