nvi for serious hacking

Oleg Petrov dsacode at yandex.ru
Sun Oct 16 15:47:05 PDT 2005


Hello, FreeBSD people.

First thing to mention is that I'm very experienced Emacs user. I was using it
for 4-5 years or so. But sometime ago i began to feel myself so uncomfortable
with it for some reasons: first, i use many different systems and emacs isn't
default application for FreeBSD or any other *BSD\Linux distribution. Second,
remote machines aren't powerful enough to start Emacs fast. I tried many small
Emacs clones like jed, joe, uemacs and several others i just can't remember.
But for different reasons i disliked all of them. Later I noticed default 
`nvi' editor, that has some nice features: it comes with FreeBSD by default 
and according to documentation it has powerful editing mechanism.

So, my question goes to all FreeBSD hackers who uses `nvi' as their general
editor. Is it possible to do serious hacking with it? More accurate:

* What programming features it support? (Does it have something like etags?
Does it have interface to gdb? And such other things..)

* Is it possible to use it comfortable with Dvorak layout? (I noticed some
bindings that relies on keys arrangement)

* How to setup it to standard FreeBSD C code indentation? And don't use
tabs as well.

It's hard choice for me to switch old good Emacs to something new, so please
give me your opinions.

I'm not subscribed to list, so please CC me.

Thanks!


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