For many years I have been an emacs editor user and have scoffed (loudly, with spittle) in the general direction of vi users. Well this weekend whilst on call I took the opportunity to learn the vim editor. ‘vi’ was my first unix editor (as it is for most people) and I’m now in a position to appreciate vim’s elegance and approach. It’s not emacs, but it’s not a hunk of junk.

In the unix / linux world ( and thus, by extension the Mac OS X universe as well ) there is much to-do made about the choice of text editors. Why Does It Matter Much of the configuration of these various systems is centered around the generation / manipulation of text-based configuration files. For example, if you’re on windows and you want to change your timezone you must go to Start Button / Control Panel / Time and Date / Timezone. On Unix / Linux / Mac OSX you simply edit a text file, change the word from PST to CDT ( or what have you ) save the file and you’re done.

When you work in the UNIX / CLI-environment a simple fact of your work environment is that you simply must have a high-powered text editor to edit configuration files, write code, or write email in a non-GUI mail tool. You have your choice of consumer-targeted editors (pico), but the two that battle for the power user demographic are vi and emacs. I’m conversant in both and have even written an encomium to the power of emacs on this very site. But I should like to dwell on an interesting aspect of the vi/emacs approaches to doing things. I had occasion to reflect on vi/emacs as writing tools when I was giving my exceedingly patient girlfriend a bit of a demo of how to use vi ( being knee-deep in drupal, it is something she’s considering needing to know more about ).