Don't vi on me and tell me it's raining! Where's pico?

[tampadave]

hi tampadave,  the modal editor vi ( vim ) is installed on all decent base distros by default because its the defacto standard for system text editing, especially across the network via ssh,  without exception bar none ( for unix-like systems ).

The reason is simple; the vim editor is ubiquitous and everyone worth their salt knows and understands  it, omitting it would be silly-- not to mention it contains a powerful tooset, is easy to use, and has a very tiny footprint in memory. 

If you do not know vim, I'd recommend learning it; also, I'd keep the fact that you don't know it a secret, especially if you're looking for a job.

Thanks Mark.  You're right about vi/vim being ubiquitous.  It's why I used to teach it to my students, and I used it for a time for c coding.  But then I adopted emacs (and it begins... Flame on!...), and just ended up using emacs instead of vi.  I never consciously stopped using vi, I just used emacs instead.  

My favorite editor today is sublime text, but it is not ported, nor likely to be ported, to aarch64/arm64.  The modal behavior of vi is an obstacle to its use.  Always has been; always will be.  Other than that, it does the same things most other editors do.  But then so do the other non-modal editors — without the modal irritation.

I've yet to find vi keybindings used by anything other than vi.  emacs keybindings are used elsewhere, notably for me in Cisco IOS.  Oh, bash too.  

This is an old, old thing of unresolvable contention.

As for jobs, eh.  If I were seeking employment at a vi siloed Unix/GNU/Linux environment, it would take about an hour to get back on track with vi, but I've not needed to do that — ever.

I'm glad vi is there.  vi is a very capable editor.  Its modal nature is so annoying to me that I'm willing to spend more time installing something else, just so that I do not have to use it, at all.  vi is not hard to use.  vi is annoying.  To me anyway.

nano is a gnu tool, at 178172 bytes for the nano_2.5.3-2_arm64.deb deb package, it is small enough to put into the tool chain, and non-modal.  (Yeah!)  I'd include it with these boot images.  

I think the social issue with vi is to "set apart" the unix/gnu/linux hardcore types from the pleebs.  I think the stickyness of vi lies in the fact that it IS annoying to "those" who are less deserving of a good system, cause they are not willing to go through the hassle of modal editing.  Which is as sensible as a dot three file extension paradigm.  (ohh that's gotta hurt!!)  This social comment applies to the exclusive presence of vi, not the presence of vi.

Forcing noobs onto the spike that is vi, is cruel (not unusual).  It keeps lots of potential adopters from adopting.  See above, regarding their "worthiness."  Forcing me to do anything is what got me here in the first place.  EULAs and NDAs, and blah blah blah, I even got away from Redhat because they started telling me what my system was going to be.  No thanks.  This whole thing is about freedom, not proscription.  Nano ought be be on these images, so that no one is forced to use vi.  Are we going to be noob friendly?  Or not?  Right now, we are not.  Don't play that line about how: "back in my day we all used vi, and liked it!"  Yeah, coming from ed, vi was awesome!

Anything but vi!  OMG!!!!  (except ed)

Whew.  That felt good.

For system configuration edits, nano wins in my experience, beating out emacs, vi, whatever....  Anything more complicated and I'm looking at sed, awk or a bash script.  Perl is good too.  You just can't beat regex when it comes to text processing.  But for upstart configs, nano wins in my opinion, and it should already be there.  vi is there too.  nano provides a choice, and makes this part of the learning curve moot.  For those who are interested, pop this wget line into your inet connected bash shell, and it'll get it for you:

wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/250291860/..._arm64.deb



David

PS: you can even build config files straight from bash, without any editor:

echo "Hello world." >> configmuch
echo "Nice weather today.  Mostly." >> configmuch
echo "I like turtles." >> configmuch
cat configmuch
Hello world.
Nice weather today.  Mostly.
I like turtles.

You'll just have to overwrite them if you make a mistake.