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.
You're having a bad day when "cat" or "echo" are your editors!
On Windows I've gotten used to TextPad (www.textpad.com) which is quite decent.
Textpad is one of the better editors for Winders. I was glad it had a "brief" mode, but it didn't have the macro language that was Brief's real power. Textpad is one of the few shareware programs that I thought was good enough to pay for. I'm still pissed at Borland for buying Brief, then abandoning it. If it were available for Linux, I'd pay for it.