[bf1942] Off Topic Admin Question

[ScratchMonkey]

--On Friday, July 25, 2003 11:21:29 PM +0200 "Andreas, Fredriksson" 
<andreas.fredriksson at dice.se> wrote:

> It must hurt a bf-playing emacs users to hear that the parts of the
> code were written in vi. :-D

Nah, I no more engage in editor wars than I do in OS wars. (I'm a veteran 
of the Amiga and OS/2 wars, and am tired of fighting. ;) )

Back in the early 80's I was doing circuit design CAD using TECO (a line 
editor with powerful macros; it was later used to write the first Emacs) on 
paper-based terminals. One had to "program" the location of gates and wires 
in a source file, then compile it to either graphic files or netlists for 
PCB layout.

*Any* video editor, even vi, is a big step up from line editors. The real 
question is how much productivity you leverage off the tool. vi doesn't 
strike me as a big step up from notepad in functionality, but maybe it's 
evolved to carry some of the coding assists I've come to expect, like 
syntax coloring (helps avoid typos) and brace-matching (imperative to us 
old LISP programmers!). I haven't used it yet, but some editors do template 
generation: Type "if" and an entire empty "if(){}else{}" sequence is 
generated for one to fill in. Epsilon has a built-in multi-file grep that I 
use constantly, and most Emacs clones have a "tags" facility for rapidly 
finding symbols in a large codebase. And of course there's various flavors 
of macros for automating some tedious piece of bulk editing.