[ale] Some days are worse than others

Jeff Lightner jlightner at water.com
Fri Jul 6 08:10:18 EDT 2007


Well I guess I can't let the anti-vi votes have the day.

For my part I rather enjoy vi/vim and regularly use many of the simple
keystroke commands to move around, insert, append, delete, yank, put,
etc... and often act on many lines (or all lines in the file) at a time.
I usually slap around developers that dare to suggest emacs on
UNIX/Linux systems at any job I'm at.

As pointed out below - vi is usually available often where emacs is not.
Knowing vi would be a good thing especially if you choose to work on a
commercial UNIX where it hasn't been installed (and won't be by folks
like me).

By the way I'll echo the comments about not liking the idea of a sudo
only distro however I do think sudo is a great tool also.   When I
worked at a large network gear maker we used it extensively.   Most
folks think of it only as a "give me root access" utility but it can be
made to do much more.   One use I found in that shop (and intend to use
it for here) is to allow people that are in certain groups that must
have access to group admin accounts (e.g. oracle for DBAs) access via
sudo.  By doing this you can eliminate direct login to those accounts
AND get a log of who used the account and when by doing something like
"sudo su - oracle".   With more creative use you can put specific
commands in and also make a centrally managed sudoers file.



-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Joe
To: ale at ale.org
Bayes
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2007 4:38 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Some days are worse than others

Sean Kilpatrick typeth:

>But, I have never opened a manual on vi and don't intend to.

Three things to know about vi:

1) type "i" if you want to type in text, or backspace over existing
text.
2) hit escape to get out of "i" mode.
3) type ":wq" to save your file and exit

I don't like vi much either, but when I've got a sick system that
can't do emacs, vi beats the hell out of ed or cat. 

Joe
--
Joe Bayes -- jbayes at spoo.mminternet.com
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