Strying off topic, but Re: text editor

[Chad Perrin]

On Thu, Jun 03, 2010 at 10:14:19AM -0400, illoai at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> I don't know much, but the source tarball is slightly
> over 7m.

I suspect a lot of that is documentation.  One thing Vim definitely has
going for it is the breadth and depth of user documentation that comes
with it.


> 
> In any case, the executable size is only loosely
> related to the actual running size.

True.  On the other hand, to offer a comparison that actually came up in
"real life", a co-worker once needed to edit a file.  She tried using
emacs to do so, but emacs couldn't open the file because it was so
friggin' large that trying to open it with emacs exhausted system
resources.  She asked me how to achieve the same thing in Vim that she
had intended to do with emacs because she discovered that it opened just
fine in Vim.

Obviously, this was very much an edge-case.  The file was *huge*,
measured in the gigabytes.  It's not a problem you're likely to encounter
in general usage.  It does give me a little faith in the ability of Vim
to avoid abusing system resources (and of vi in general).

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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