[juneau-lug] Re: Editors
- From: Nels Tomlinson <nelstomlinson@xxxxxxx>
- To: juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 01:58:32 -0500
Eric, I use emacs for most purposes. It's almost as common as vi on
*nix machines nowadays, and tremendously more powerful. An earlier
reply talked about different specialized modes for LaTeX, every
programming language known to man, drawing pictures, email, web
browsing, and every thing that one might want to do on a computer.
Still, a minimal *nix system is far more likely to have vi than emacs,
so I suppose that if I were serious about system administration, I'd
learn vi.
Emacs is _not_ minimal; it's an operating system, and it uses *nix or
windows as its device driver level. If you want, you can do everything
that you would ever want to do on a computer in emacs, with a
miraculously consistent interface for everything. LaTeX and Emacs with
the AucTex, reftex and fly-spell modes makes word processors like Word
or Openoffice look like kiddie-toys. It's astounding how much better
the output is, and how much less work it takes to get it. You can
actually get better content in your papers, because you spend less time
fiddling with the formatting details that the software should do for you
(and the word processors _don't_ do right).
Having said all that, emacs takes a bit of learning. It's _definitely_
worth spending the time to learn it, _if_ you are going to be spending a
lot of time doing the sort of jobs it does well, like writing structured
documents (using LaTeX), programming, working with text files, and so
on. If you don't have a need for power tools, you may not find the
learning curve worth climbing: it's not terribly steep, but it's long.
Here's a story you might find interesting:
In the Purdue statistics department, the secretaries used vi and
plain-TeX to produce documents. They had to type up fliers and so on
with equations, and that just doesn't work right in a word processor.
When they would get a temp, they would train her in vi and plain-TeX,
because they could get more work out of the temp that way, training time
and all. The combination allowed for very fast production of very
high-quality documents, and a temp who was only going to be there for a
few weeks could learn it fast and be productive very quickly. These
aren't grad students I'm talking about: these are secretaries, who
generally weren't college material.
All the secretaries had windows machines on their desks, and spent most
of their working day using them to run an X-server to log onto an AIX
system for their various tasks. They only used the Microsoft software
for web browsing, because Netscape was nasty bad in those days,
especially on AIX.
The graduate students had Xterminals, and we spent most of our time on
the AIX system, using LaTeX or a programming language, usually from
within emacs. If we needed something that only ran on Microsoft, we
could use the xterm to hook up to an MS compute server and run Word or
Excel via the xterm.
Nels
Eric M. Niewoehner wrote:
> I am about to teach a section on editors and I was curious as to which
> text editor you all preferred. While I am on my local workstation, I
> always use the GUI, but shell sessions require a plain-text editor. The
> author of the text I am using is keen on vi.
>
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