[LBo] Editors

[James Allen]

On 10/17/06, Zero Piraeus <schesis at gmail.com> wrote:
> :
>
> > There are some solid reasons for at least gaining a minimum familiarity
> > with vi/vim.  Perhpas the strongest of these is you never know when you
> > may have to edit something on someone else's system.  About the only
> > editor that you can be sure will be there is vi/vim.
>
> Everyone says that, don't they? I honestly don't know because I've
> always been happy to use vi, but I've heard it said so often that "you
> must learn vi; vi is the only editor you can count on finding" that it
> starts to sound like a shibboleth.
>
> It would be interesting to discover how many UNIX-like systems really
> don't have pico, nano, joe or some equivalent installed by default.
>

As someone who works in a hetrogeneous server enviroment with Linux
(Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo), Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX, I can tell you vi
is the only editor that is installed on all of them.

Linux environments are a little tricky when you say "installed by
default" because with many distributions there are several ways to
install. For instance, I install Debian with the minimal net-install
CD and there is no editor installed initially. The first one I install
is vim. Some distros like to start people out with nano when
installing via live-cd.

On the other hand, if your installing with a desktop installation
method on a distro like Fedora, Mandriva, or the like, you will
probably get all kinds of editors. But I don't install that way... but
that would be the subject for another thread.

James