Re: CHAT: The ridiculously stupid, offtopic HCI thread.

Keith Gaughan scripsit:

> Yup, they're mostly Unix tools that date from the '70s. Nobody uses ed
> anymore,
/me waves his hand.

Well, actually, I use ex; ed is a bit too minimal even for me, particularly
in the lack of prompting and the absence of "z".  (Maybe I should hack
GNU ed to incorporate the few ex features I actually use, and switch
to it.)

> but emacs and vi are commonly used because vi has a small
> footprint making it useful for admins who need a powerful editor they
> can fit on a floppy.
In fact, vim is about 900K, GNU Emacs about 1500K; the size difference
isn't that huge any more.  (There are vi's that are smaller than vim,
of course.)

> Emacs is completely programmable and almost an
> OS in itself. These are, and pay attention now P-O-W-E-R T-O-O-L-S.
There's a very interesting comparison of ed, vi, emacs, Sam, and wily
(two GUI-based editors in the same spirit) at
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/complexitychapter.html .

--
Eric Raymond is the Margaret Mead               John Cowan
of the Open Source movement.                    jcowan@reutershealth.com
        --Bruce Perens,                         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
          some years ago                        http://www.reutershealth.com

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