nvi for serious hacking

[Andreas Klemm]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 02:08:40AM +0900, Sangwoo Shim wrote:
> Actually the first thing that I do after minimal installing of new system is
> to install vim from the ports tree. (in fact, installing cvsup, of course :-)
> I remember once upon a time someone (david?) made a suggestion that nvi in
> our tree should be changed to vim-lite(or something.) I'm tend to agree
> with that.. (Although vim is GPL'd, nvi is in the src/contrib anyway..)

Please no ;-)

Although vim has some nice features its definitively different
to standard vi behaviour, which can really bitch you in some
situations.

Most favourite example:
I personally still get mad if it comes to the "u" undo key.

Standard vi lets you toggle your last change by hitting "u".

So I'm used that it doesn't hurt to type the "u" key multiple times.
This is very usefull to let your eye browse through a complex change
to make an "a/b" comparison.

If you do that in vim, then you loose as many last changes as you
hit "u" repeatedly. And if you did many changes you loose a serious
amount of work.

>From my experience you cannot recover from such a mistake.

Therefore standard vi is for me much superior, since with it
I can get my job done in a reliable manner without fancy
side effects.

I don't want to start an editor flamewar. I know many people
who start to like vi starting with vim. And editors are an
issue of taste and experience in use ...

Its only a thing to take into consideration whats better.

To learn standard vi, thats available everywhere.
Or to have the same situation as with emacs ...
Vim is still kind of an exot for me.
That its standard vi on nearly all Linuxes around
still doesn't qualify it enough as standard vi...

	Andreas ///

-- 
Andreas Klemm - Powered by FreeBSD 6
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