On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 01:46:18PM -0400, David L. Craig wrote: > Joost wrote: > > > > In my experience, the best one is the bash(1) manpage. It is is really > > vital. You don't properly realise how much until you've read all of it > > (well maybe read a little faster over the readline bits). > > > > Next come grep(1), sed(1) and awk(1). > > No, next comes knowing your editor as well as your wife > of twenty years. If vi, then memorize man ex; if emacs, > use info (you'll NEVER memorize it)... Fast edits really > stimulate the brain cells--you'll be glad you really > studied this stuff forever more.
Fair correction. This is also an organic part of the unix corpus. I wouldn't know so sure about emacs. It's possible worse than perl in the sense of never returning home, because the trip just keeps going and going and going and there's just no end in sight. And then perl isn't even at version 6 yet, whereas emacs.. It's even forked successfully a few times. Lets just say that perl is unix history, undergraduate level, and that emacs is the more academic course, that also covers the medieval times that many people have sort of forgotten about. A time when dotNET was spelled DECnet, and it was just as proprietary and evil. A time when script kiddies were the anonymous young girls slaving away behind highly advanced mechanical punch-hole machines, sold by an upstart vendor named ibm. A time when unix had only been declared dead-and-buried twice yet. All these lost moments, forgotten in the sea of time... *snif* Vi is more interesting for other reasons that you already stipulate: People should learn editors the right way and in the right order. First there is ed(1), the standard editor. Then there is ex(1), the extended editor, adding a whole new dimension to editing, coming from the world of ed. :-) Finally, you are fully prepared for vi(1), the visual editor. Come and experience the wealths of its feature rich editing environment, the breakthough visual user interface, yet that still performs fine over a twelve-second latency 2400 baud dialin terminal connection. And there's this gee-wiz "modality" feature, it's almost intuitive! Cheers, Joost
