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Reading the article and the comments here, I came to the conclusion that I seemingly don't really use vi. As in: I don't live in it. On a typical day, I work with my files using grep, awk, bash, python, sed, make, cat, xargs, etc. And, of course, vi. But I don't really use it like some (most?) people here seem to do. I don't list and navigate through files in vi (I use tree, ls and find for that). When I use vi, it's mostly for short bursts of manual editing. Occasionally, vim's syntax highlighting comes in handy - but that's about it. Don't get me wrong: that is exactly why I _love_ vi. It starts fast[0]. It fits in pretty well with the rest of the unix environment (it can read stdin, for example; and with vim you can open multiple files given on the command line - and you can construct that file list with any of the standard unix tools, of course). So, for me, the question "IDE or vi" ends much earlier. I don't even come to the point where I could discuss editing features. Can't read from stdin? Doesn't start in less than 1 second? Doesn't fit into my work-flow. Of course, vi(m) is a great editor, for all the reasons mentioned here and in the article. But the unix user-land has some great tools, too. And it includes vi. So it is by definition an even better editor than vi. :-) So that's what I use. [0] Believe it or not, emacs starts still too slow for me. These one or two seconds tend to disrupt me a lot (I've tried it, with GNU emacs). And, as I said before, I invoke my editor pretty often, maybe 50 times a day. |