need learning direction suggestions on using editors

[Chuck Swiger]

Zhang Weiwu wrote:
[ ... ]
> Should I advance to vim right now or emacs, or is it that I didn't dig 
> into vi deep enough to release its full power? I wonder how many 
> programmers are still using 4BSD vi (compare to enchanced vi's)? Maybe 
> none? Maybe many?

There are reasonable people who use stock vi.  I happen to prefer Emacs, which
is probably better suited to the requirements you've listed (cc:'ed below).

vi is much lighter-weight in terms of disk space and resource usage, although
my fond(?) memories of a ~100K staticly-linked vi binary are outdated.  :-)

> I know very few about editors other than vi, if I'm going to learn 
> another editor now, I wish I can be using that forever, and I wish the 
> editor have good L10N (esp. Chinese). I do some Java program, php and 
> perl program but not C, and I'd likely to do these kind of program in 
> the coming years, so what is the best editor for my kind?

One might consider:

/usr/ports/chinese/emacs20
/usr/ports/editors/emacs21

> I'd like the editor's style to be accepted by readline so I can use 
> commandline and editor in the same way.

FreeBSD uses GNU readline, which supports both Emacs-style and vi-style
keybindings (RTM "man readline"), so don't worry about it.

-- 
-Chuck