[ale] Emacs stinks, Vi is for wimps

[Joe Knapka]

Alexander Barton <abarton at mindspring.com> writes:

> James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > Real coders use toggle switches on a ...
> > 
> > It's been _real_ quiet on ALE lately and I thought I'd poke the hornets
> > nest and see if I'm still subscribed.
> 
> Okay, I'll take the bait.
> 
> The GNU folks are fine and all, in their own way. :-) But they refuse to 
> document their tools in the man pages.  (Where the one God whose name is 
> Allah intended them to be.)  Instead, they insist on placing all the 
> documentation for their tools (like /bin/tar) in info.  (Use "ESC ESC [ 
> B" to scoll down one line.  Why don't the hjkl keys do what I expect?) 
> The man pages are then left incomplete and out of date usually with a 
> note at the bottom to see info for the real docs.  Quoth: "...you should 
> run info and read the tar info pages, or use the info mode in emacs." 
> Info mode in _EMACS_!?  Aiee!  Clearly this is the work of the hands of 
> Satan.

While emacs is my first and best-beloved editor, I have to agree with
you, (let's see, mutter mutter, carry the 1), about 5000% regarding
info. Not only is info so different from man that the average user is
never going to figure it out, but half the time the bloody thing isn't
even configured properly!

  $ man widget
  Blah blah blah. Yak yak yak. But there's more!
  Use "info widget" to get full documentation.
  
  $ info widget
  # No useful error message, just a normal-looking info
  # page containing NO INFORMATION WHATSOEVER about
  # "widget".
  File: dir  Node: Top  This is the top of the INFO tree.
  ....
  
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Who decided this was a
good idea? Can we have them hung by their toenails until very, very
contrite?

One point in vi's favor is that you can count on it being installed on
virtually any *nix box, and it runs in something like 10% of the RAM
required by emacs.  I'm getting to the point where I can use vi about
as well as a four year old can tie her shoes. It's not as bad as I've
previously believed. Just.... so.... different......

Cheers,

-- Joe Knapka