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If you work with UNIX / Linux servers a lot, or really at all, it's a good idea to be comfortable with basic vi usage - vim being Vi IMproved, with some features that we've all become comfortable with. You will find a version of vi on almost any UNIX-ish system you're likely to find running. It's an incredibly robust and battle-tested editor which can help you out of tight situations. Nano isn't so bad and is fairly common now, but its' predecessor, Pico, was absolutely terrible for editing code. Pico was originally the editor bundled with the Pine e-mail client, and it had a nasty habit of chopping lines of text at 80 characters wide. I once used Pico to edit a hundreds-of-lines-long apache config, bungled the whole thing, and had to manually reconstruct it with vi. At the time, I was a fairly new employee in my first tech job as support for a Linux distributor in the 90s and our build engineer fairly quickly informed me that it was time I learn vi. Any system with vim installed on it - including a fresh Mac - will have vimtutor, which I highly recommend everyone spend a half hour with. When I taught Linux admin courses, I had everyone run through this at lunch on the first day to help them avoid the professional embarrassment I had. ;) [Edit: and I second what everyone else says about it not necessarily being a supreme development experience. I use a Mac with, over the years, TextMate, Sublime, Light Table, and now Atom. Some people make a convincing argument that Emacs is a supreme dev environment, but I've never quite picked it up] |