Thursday, April 28, 2005
I like that 6 editor
I am an unrepentant computer geek, and I still have trouble diving into the emacs vs vi editor wars. I am perfectly willing to concede that emacs can do more things (hell, there's even a psychoanalysis module for it), but I refuse to climb its learning curve. Back in the days before multiple open terminal windows were possible it was probably worth the effort, but I can do everything I need to do with several open windows and the most superior of all text-editors: vi (or as an old bio professor of mine once called it, 6 (geek trivia: it actually stands for visual interactive)). And I keep stumbling across things it can do that I didn't know about. For example I have a bunch of compressed files (created with the Unix utility named, amazingly enough, compress). I wanted to look at the contents of one of them and opened one up without first using uncompress to turn it back into its regular self. vi opened up and uncompressed it on the fly. Now that it is pretty cool.
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