Wordstar (was [rescue] FrameMaker_

[Caleb Shay]

On 2004-03-24 13:58:47 -0500 Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net> wrote:
> vi was the first non-DOS, non-Pico editor I learned on a UNIX system 
> - and
> its corrupted me to the point that I cant use Emacs without having a 
> reference sheet nearby.
> 
> Bill
> 

Under DOS I generally only needed to edit/write files of a few lines, 
usually batch files, and my editor of choice became edlin (much to 
everybody else's confusion).

My first UNIX editor was pico.  It was all I used for about a year for 
basic administation stuff (I wasn't the admin) and writing HTML, then 
one day one of the servers went down early in the morning before the 
sysadmin came in and I happened to be there.  I was knowledgable 
enough to get it back up, but one file needed to be edited and pico 
wasn't on that machine.  I knew how to open vi and get into insert 
mode so I could make the changes, and I knew to hit escape to get back 
to command mode.  I then spent 30 minutes reading the IRIX 5.3 vi man 
page trying to find out how to save and close the file!  However, soon 
after that I was introduced to the power of ':%s/' and figured the 
time I lost learning this "arcane" editor would be saved 10-fold just 
by this innocuous little command.  While my flavor of vi has changed 
over the years (though I've stuck with vim for quite a few years now), 
it is still my editor of choice.  My biggest problem using non-vi 
editors is constantly hitting escape, which in many editors either 
puts a nasty escape character into my text or closes the editor 
completely!

I have tried to use emacs a few times, though never intentionally as 
an editor.  In my still unending pursuit of the perfect command line 
imap client I decided to try emacs for VM.  Never did manage to get it 
to work.  Any mail client that is not usable from a default install I 
give up on immediately (which put mutt out of the running too).  
Occasionally I'll be working on somebody else's system and they will 
have emacs set as $EDITOR.  I will be doing something like a cvs 
checkin and suddenly I've got emacs in front of me.  Most of the time 
I can't figure out how to save or quit so I start up another terminal 
and kill it :P.

Cheers,

Caleb