When I first got into linux and openbsd, I thought vi sucked. Then by reading linuxtoday.com I ran into some articles about vi. One was from the creator of vi and he explained why vi is the way it is (it was written in the days when you didn't have a monitor, just a telepromptor). Then another article the author explained that he liked vi because he didn't have to move his hands far from the asdf jkl; keys to use all the functions of vi. From then on I forced myself to learn it. The only time I move my hands from the asdf jkl; keys is to press the esc key. I tried to learn emacs too but there's too must ctrl this and alt that and ctrl meta alt blah. Now I find myself making mistakes in other editors especially in MS wordpad because I'm so use to using vi. In that situation, I miss the features of vi and it's so much easier to do things in vi. I once demonstrated to my boss (who is a linux fan and doesn't know how to use vi) how to modify a config file for dns, he commented that he hated the vim on linux because it never works as easy as he saw me use vi on openbsd (he added something about vim on linux not being consistent too).
> Take the time to learn real vi. You might just like it. vi is on every > Unix machine...it's like notepad in windows or edlin in MSDOS, you > need to know the core system, and if you really need something else, > fine, but you have to learn what is on the system. Learn vim, you > have learned what is in Linux, not what is in Unix. > > Nick.
