Have you checked SourceForge? You may find a text editor there more to your liking.
Posted on 11/10/2005 2:38:44 PM PST by TChris
I am a little acquainted with some of the xNIX (UNIX-like) O/S's out there, having used Corel Linux, Fedora Core, Mandrake, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and HP-UX to some degree. I am not afraid of command-line work, but I have a major gripe about all the xNIX's when it comes to non-X work:
vi sucks.
ed blows.
Have any xNIX gurus out there ever used the MS-DOS text editor (edit.com)? For a long-time PC user, that is the standard by which all others are judged. The text editors in Gnome and KDE work very much like Edit.com, but I can't seem to find anything for the xNIX text-only shells that will let me work with that much ease of use.
I want to become more xNIX literate, but if it means really learning vi to do it, I'll keep procrastinating.
I gladly welcome suggestions!
Have you checked SourceForge? You may find a text editor there more to your liking.
OK, well vi doesn't technically suck. But my experience with vi so far has sucked. There is a benefit to the menu-driven interface. It's one of the reasons that PC software has left others so far behind in popularity. You can run a text app with a menu just as fast as one without, and it only costs one line of your display. That's a small price to pay for GREATLY enhanced learnability/useability IMO.
If you are interested in Unix and all its flavors, learn vi.
No matter what box you land on, I guarantee it will be there. Emacs probably won't. Don't get me started on LaTeX.
Trust me on this one, I get paid to know this stuff.
Emacs/Xemacs are a bit "different" for someone coming from a DOS background. But, it is more similar in a way as it is, unlike vi, "modeless." Xemacs is, as it's name implies, geared towards X11 use, but when invoked via 'xemacs -nw' will work in text mode just like regular emacs (which also defaults to X mode these days).
On the other hand, there is nano (widely available) or pico (part of the PINE project), which are pretty similar to your basic DOS text editor.
There are so many Unix/Linux editors out there, I'm sure you can find one that you will like.
In the absence of that, I'll second your suggestion of pico.
Let me second that...if you want to work on commercial unixes, you must learn at least a bit of (the commercial vendors' typically minimalistic) vi. (as compared to vim)
Oh - and IMHO, that one-liner jobie "ed"... blows.
I prefer emacs.
If you used or know WordStar, you should check to see if "joe" is on your machine... if not, install it. It uses most of the old WordStar ctrl-x commands, you can turn on (and off) the onscreen help, and it is pretty simple. Even if you aren't familiar with WordStar.
Most *nix servers should have pico/nano on them. They are pretty much the same program- a basic line editor. I use them for most all simple shell and text file editing. I know they are both available for download... at least nano is, cuz when I couldn't find pico on a new RH9 install, I dl'd nano and installed it (and renamed it to pico).
I wouldn't piss on vi if it was fully engulfed in flames. And every time I accidentally enter it, I wish it *was*. Haven't had the patience to even look at/learn emacs. I just use pico/nano for most everything on the server from the remote command line, and joe if I need something more sophisticated. If I'm on my own Linux systems (console)- not remotely- and I had to do some document production or editing, I'd use OpenOffice. But usually in KDE, I use Kwrite.
Just my $0.02
The next time you accidentally get into vi, just remember:
"[Esc]:q!"
Let me know if you find something like "picosudo" instead of "visudo."
*snicker*
That's about the only command in vi that I know!
And usually, I forget the [esc] or the : and spend a few minutes saying things that turn the air blue and start melting the monitor... [grin]
I don't need picosudo or visudo when I have pico/nano or joe. Works for me quite well.
'Course I do all my maintenance work as root, contrary to *all* good advice- but I figure that if *I* screw it up, it's *my* fault and about the only thing I'm doing on my servers is root level maintenance anyway, so sudo just doesn't come into play. Plus, I'm from the old school [*really old* school, actually] where RTFS is not considered optional. After the first few times of doing some massively irretrievable command as 'root', ya gets a bit more careful than the average "Duh, I know DOS and Windoze, so I'm a computer ekspurt" user. [big grin]
Check out joe and see if it won't do the job for you. Cheers!
Oooops, meant that last line for TChris. Sorry.
But thanks for your reminder of how to do the "great escape" from vi.
LOL
vi's regex is a bit limited, but if you're talking about vim, its regular expression engine supports every feature that grep and grep "extended" (grep -E or egrep) support and can even do things like variable-width look-behind assertions (even perl's regex engine is limited to fixed-width look-behind assertions).
The native vim regex syntax is a bit quirky when compared to that of grep, sed and perl, but if you do heavy text editing it's well worth the effort required to learn it. :he regex will get you the basic regex docs.
Thanks much to all of you! I will get pico and see how that goes. It also looks like I should just suck it up and spend a week or two of intensive practice to learn vi. If that's my main hangup with xNIX, then it needs to be overcome.
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