🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5067@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> ez004559@pollux.ucdavis.edu (Down with Unix!) writes:

Your byline above is enough to start a flame war by itself.

>Unix is a monstrous Goliath... And it don't have windows. If you want Minix,
>you can get an IBM clone. I think I've read enough stuff about Minix and
>Unix to last me a lifetime.

Unix has its faults. AmigaDOS has its faults. I also fault your flaming
posting. I use Sun OS at work, and it does in fact have windows.

>OUt of curiousity, how many of you brain damaged puppies out there use some
>incarnation of VI on your Amiga? Get a life! Haven't any of you heard of
>windows? Try Texed. You can spawn new Texed windows at will, and cut and paste
>from any Texted. It's easy to use, intuitive, doesn't take any more than 2
>hours to master.

A rude and immature question like this doesn't really deserve a response,
but just for the hell of it: I've been using vi for 10 or 11 years, and
its commands are hardwired into my fingertips. This allows me to do complex
editing operations *extremely* fast. If I switched to a better editor,
such as an emacs or possibly texted, it would slow me down due to the
need to *think* about the commands. Currently I edit by reflex, and that's
much faster than any conscious action possibly could be. Look up "conditioned
reflex" in a good psychology text to see a numeric timing comparison.

Or watch a martial arts demo, and note the difference between the intermediate
and advanced students. A great deal of the improvement comes from turning
the various motions into conditioned reflexes.

Furthermore there is one very important area of complex commands that *do*
require conscious thought, where vi is superior to all existing editors...
its global/range search-and-replace command set surpasses even Gnu Emacs.
vi-haters never seem to be aware of just how powerful it is, but once you
learn the entire set, it's a very hard set of capabilities to give up.

Sometimes I think it'd be worth it to switch to get e.g. more powerful
macros, the ability to window, etc. But not just yet; it'd take several
years to turn the new commands into conditioned reflexes.

The lack of windowing is less important on a system that itself supports
windows, since you can use multiple system windows as a substitute. Cut
and paste is supported in vi in a way painful to vi-novices and less
elegant than e.g. emacs, yet again seems perfectly convenient when it
happens by conditioned reflex.

>Anyone who uses vi on the amiga is going to Unix hell after
>they die. Satan will personally tie you up to an ancient vt52 terminal hooked
>up to a pdp11 with a load average of 60 and force you to work on vi for hours
>on end. 

Pretty funny...the one redeeming part of your posting.

And I shudder to think of the kind of hell reserved for narrow minded people
who flame about their own limited understandings.
	Doug
-- 
Doug Merritt		{pyramid,apple}!xdos!doug
Member, Crusaders for a Better Tomorrow		Professional Wildeyed Visionary