Slashdot Mirror
VIM 6.0 is Out
LinuxNews.pl writes "It's more then a year after releasing the first 6.0 alpha. Lot's of improvements (i.e. you can edit files via FTP!) - check
them out on vim.org" Of course everyone knows that vim is the best text editor in the world. Anyone who tells you differently is either wrong, lying, or criminally insane. (Or an emacs user, in which case they are wrong, lying and criminally insane).
How come we can't mod CT's original post down as a troll?
Thank God I'm an atheist!
So did Vigor, the vi paperclip, make it into the 6.0 release?
...use cat and od
Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes
... is at SourceForge. IMHO these pages are better organized and more helpful than the stuff on vim.org. Obviously not always up to date though, as the front page does not yet reflect the 6.0 release. :-|
Don't expect great new features in a next version. Vim has grown into a complex program with so many features and options that there is nobody who uses them all. Stability and easy of use are the main goals for the future.
I'm not a vi user, and this isn't intended to start a flame war, but it's nice to see vim sticking by it's one of it's principles - making a lightweight editor.
Bah - Emacs is already at version 20. Clearly this means Emacs is 333% better than vim!
Wait, you mean version numbers aren't a measure of quality? Dang!
From: patl@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti)
Subject: The True Path (long)
Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacs,alt.slack
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi *and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, 'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
---
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929 /bin/ed /usr/ucb/vi /usr/bin/emacs
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990
Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem$ ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
---
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
?
Carousel is a lie!
Text editors are for wimps!! I use a very small magnet to write my files. and CMOS when I'm feeling up to it..
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
I do believe it's called "humor", as in VIM vs EMACS is a geek injoke....
:(
Of course, the holy wars start because people have no sense of humor about this stuff.
No, it's like asking a Ferrari to emulate a 60-story office complex, an employment agency, an aircraft manufacturer, a luxury yacht, and a Ferrari.
Do you know what they call that emulation mode?
VILE (vi-like emacs)
For vi emulation of emacs, just type ":sh emacs" (without the quotes)
The middle mind speaks!
Nice anti-emacs rant, Taco. You also mentioned you're impressed that vim can now edit files via ftp. Well, let's take a look at the emacs changelog...
GNU Emacs NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. 17-Aug-1988
[snip]
Changes in version 18.52.
[snip]
** Visiting remote files.
On an internet host, you can now visit and save files on any other
internet host directly from Emacs with the commands M-x ftp-find-file
and M-x ftp-write-file. Specify an argument of the form HOST:FILENAME.
Since standard internet FTP is used, the other host may be any kind
of machine and is not required to have any special facilities.
So, emacs has been doing this for 13 years. You whining about how emacs users are crazy is like a Windows user in 1995 insulting Mac users, who had at the time been using the neat new Win95 features since 1984.
> Has anyone done an emacs emulation mode for vim?
No, because they haven't figured out how to compress the 75 megs of diskspace a fuly featured emacs takes into the vim source, to give you that true "emacs feel".
as a novice linux user I ask what is the difference between Vi And EMACS.
vi is like masturbation. It's not as good as the alternative, but it's always there.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
The two editors evolved differently. Vim started as 100% compatible vi clone with extra features, while emacs was an attempt to create a 100% free (as in speech) text editor when the alternatives were vi (closed source commercial implementations), pico etc.
So in a nutshell here are the differences:
o Emacs uses lisp to completely customize the editor. Vim uses it's own little scripting language to do syntax highlighting, create shortcuts etc...
o Vim is just an editor. Emacs will do everything except pick your nose (ei: check e-mail, surf the net, even play games). You can also write Emacs extensions with emacs-lisp to get it to pick your nose if you really want it to.
o The interface is quite different. Vim (like vi) has editing mode and command mode. Emacs just has editing mode. Both are command-driven though unless you use gvim or XEmacs - in that case you get an X11 user interface.
There are lots of other differences feature wise but these are the big ones. The best suggestion I can give you is to just try both. They are both relatively hard to learn since you have to memorize a lot of commands. But once you have them down pat they easily become two of the best text editors available.
One thing to note though: because they are hard to learn it's suggested that you only pick them up if you do a LOT of text-editing (programmers for example). They really are programmers editors and not for people who just want to create the odd ascii file. Do not use them expecting something like notepad for windows. If you do you will hate them.
--
Garett
vi - A VIsual editor. Older, smaller, and less full-featured. Newer vi-decendants, like vim, are larger and more feature-ruch. Mode-based editing - in insert more, typing "x" inserts an "x" into your buffer, while in command mode typing "x" deletes the character under the cursor. Commands are based on "ed", which is also the ancestor of sed. You can do some inserting stuff by feeding it ed commands, along the lines of ":%s/foo/bar/g" for global replacement. Pretty much tty based, some newer varients let you use the mouse directly.
emacs. Editor MACroS. "The extensible self-documenting text editor." "Escape Meta Alt Control Shift." Modeless editing (mostly, sort of). Has a LISP interpreter built in, which means its big (some might say bloated) and can do anything you want it to - there are entire applications written in Emacs Lisp. Editing involves a lot of "control" and "alt" key combinations - Control-X Control-C to exit, Control-X Control-F to open a new file, and so on. Works ok in a tty, or under X with point-n-click, dropdown menus, etc.
I like vi for small quick edits, and it's easier to run over a slow link. Emacs has a heck of a learning curve, but once you understand it, it'll be your best Unix friend. (Yes, there is a Windows version too.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Ugh, can we avoid the whole "Holy War" thing. I'm rather CNN'ed out right now.
Call it "Infinite Debate" or something like that instead.
vi{m}? has 5 modes:
Beep mode: everything you type rings the bell
Disappearing text mode: everything you type vanishes
Flash mode: everything you type makes the screen blink, scroll, and erase
Escape mode: everything you type needs an ESC
colon mode: all your text shows up at the bottom of the screen after a :
Emacs has 5 modes:
ESC
Meta
Alt
Control
Shift- regularly
In all modes everything you type requires the depressing of more than one of the above keys
in addition to a very-long-and-verbose-definition-that-you-look-up
after 22 years of vi, I think hjkl instead of
left down up right.
Ethics II Axiom 2. "Man thinks." B. Spinoza
then Windows 2000 must be absolutely fantastic.
Therefore, no matter what you use on a regular basis, you should still learn how to use vi.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
gunzip -c > executable
That way you don't have to do nearly as much typing.
Stability and easy of use are the main goals for the future.
Stability and what?!?
-Karl
Emacs President Shrub today announced a new iniative in the war on user-friendlyness; Operation Infinite Swapspace.
This can be seen as a direct response to vi's recent attacks on Emacs functionality when a flock of rabid vi supporters chanted "vi don't suck, vi is leet, vi can edit in ftp!" outside the Emacs embassy in Kaboom, capital of Afarawayistan.
An Emacs representative commented the attack with "Those evil vi-llains will do anything to confuse the issues. The fact is that Emacs can solve the Towers of Hanoi problem faster than a vi user can learn to save a file and this bugs the hell out of them since most of them don't even know where Hanoi is. We are going to find their leader /vigor/bin/laden and make him pay for this atrocity."
vigor himself just said that "Vi vill :q! them!"
The Piconian ambassador was not available for a // comment, but rumours has it that he's busy compiling evidence.
Money for nothing, pix for free