On Saturday, September 02, 2017 06:46:33 PM david...@freevolt.org wrote: > On Sat, 2 Sep 2017, Mario Castelán Castro wrote: > [snip] > > > On 02/09/17 13:34, Dejan Jocic wrote: > >> You can set up both Vim and Emacs as powerful programming editors. > > > > These are the *worst* possible suggestions. Both of these editors > > require a lot of learning to even use them at all. If the OP follows > > your advice, his users will have the impression that all software in > > GNU/Linux is as arcane and difficult to use as GNU Emacs and Vim > > are. > > I somehow doubt that you yourself find Emacs or Vim "difficult to > use", or believe their design is "arcane". (Of course, I might well be > mistaken. I'm only guessing.) > > My contrary view, for whatever it might be worth: In the early weeks > of my own initiation to a unix-like operating system, we used > Emacs. Accompanied by a cheat-sheet of commonly useful keyboard > shortcuts, I found that learning the basics of Emacs in particular, > and navigating the self-contained documentation, was an eye-opening > introduction to the unix-like world and its universe of reliable > tools. > > When, many years later, I developed a greater interest in computers, I > was happy to discover that > > 1. I hadn't been taught only how to ride a tricycle, but had been > riding a full-fledged bicycle all along, and > > 2. I would never need to learn to use another text-editor again, if > I didn't want to do so.
I "grew up" using editors (of a sort) (or card punches) (or teletype machines) on a variety of other OSs (IBM 360, Univac 1108, PDP-8, -11 (and one other) VAX, Foxboro, Westinghouse, (not in sequential order), and eventually DOS, Windows, and Linux. I didn't encounter Vim or Emacs until I got to Linux. By then I was very used to GUI editors, a vast improvement over things I had used before. I made more than one attempt to learn both, and I do occasionally use vi (when I'm stuck with no other editor), but I wouldn't wish either on a novice programmer. Further, I don't think they have any advantage over a good GUI editor with features like a scripting language, keyboard macros, outlining / folding, syntax highlighting, and such.
