Re: alternative to vi

On Sun, 18 Dec 2005, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.linux, in article
<40lodmF18br1mU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Aaron Gray wrote:

>Is there an alternative editor I can use over SSH that is availiable
>"builtin" to RedHat 9 and Fedora Core ?

Looking at the package description file in Fedora Core 2 as an example:

[compton ~]$ zgrep -i editor fc2.packages.gz
ed 0.2 The GNU line editor.
emacs 21.3 GNU Emacs text editor
gconf-editor 2.6.0 Editor/admin tool for GConf
gedit 2.6.0 gEdit is a small but powerful text editor for GNOME.
gthumb 2.3.2 Image viewer, editor, organizer
hexedit 1.2.7 A hexadecimal file viewer and editor.
jed 0.99.16 A fast, compact editor based on the S-Lang screen library.
joe 2.9.8 An easy to use, modeless text editor.
nano 1.2.3 A small text editor
nedit 5.3 A GUI text editor for systems with X and Motif.
nvi-m17n 1.79 Common files for the nvi multilingualized text editor.
sed 4.0.8 A GNU stream text editor.
vim 6.2.457 The VIM editor.
[compton ~]$

But the question is, did any of these get installed?

>I find vi very difficult to use. I would like to know who to use it though !

vim is almost certainly installed on Red Hat, and it provides the emulation
of 'vi'. The thing you have to understand is that while there may be a lot
of available editors, only two are (virtually) guaranteed to be on every
UNIX or Unix-like system: ed, and vi (ed uses the colon commands you may
have learnt in 'vi' - really crude, and a severe pain in the posterior,
but usable). Thus, knowing how to use vi virtually assures you will find
a functional editor no matter what.

>Tips such as how to do a command are welcome :)

[compton ~]$ apropos vim
vim (1) - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor
vim [ex] (1) - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor
vim [gvim] (1) - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor
vim [rvi] (1) - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor
vim [rview] (1) - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor
vim [vi] (1) - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor
vim [view] (1) - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor
vimtutor (1) - the Vim tutor
[compton ~]$

Notice the last one.

Old guy
.

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