Amen.
About the only systems that I've used extensively over the years that I didn't have a copy of vi readily available were hp-1000 and hp-3000 systems running RTE-A and MPE-V respectively.
One thing that really kind of upsets me is that some lame nerd stole my copy of the O'reilly vi reference manual. That is total suckage. Every time I thumbed through that, I'd find something that vi can do that I didn't know about.
The only editor I've ever really liked as much as vi was Brief. There's some stuff that Brief would do (Though it was strictly DOS only), that I still haven't found anything else to replace it with.
Lowest of the low.
> Every time I thumbed through that, I'd find something that vi can do that I didn't know about.
There's tons I don't know about vi, so maybe I should find myself a copy.
I'm one of very few folks who still know and use 'ed' on occasion (typically, when a system hangs on boot due to fsck failing, you're in single-user, and all you've got to edit /etc/fstab is 'ed'. (Don't forget that initial 'P' to get a prompt!) You'd think I could translate that into vi easier than most, but there's some sort of mental block...
Then again, I shouldn't complain about 'ed'. There's always the REAL Sysadmin's editor, "cat >".
> The only editor I've ever really liked as much as vi was Brief. There's some stuff that Brief would do (Though it was strictly DOS only), that I still haven't found anything else to replace it with.
Brief was great on Microsoft systems, yep. On Windows I've gotten used to TextPad (www.textpad.com) which is quite decent. I've gotten Nedit to run on most of my Unix and Linux systems (it's a kick on the Mac under X11) and it's not bad.
One thing that still bites me with vi is that I got used to using cursor/keypad escape sequences in vi on a few modern systems, but not all my remote systems recognize them, and they interpret Esc[A as commands... so it's back to the HJKL home keys again... and I can't seem to keep straight which systems are "safe" for cursor keys... habits die hard.