On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 10:48:10AM -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
> MHR wrote:
>>
>> Vi is not the world's best editor
>
> Heh, understatement of the century.
> It's an awful editor. I wish I could hire the person who came up with
> the user interface, only to have the satisfaction of having him/her
> fired five minutes later. With no severance package.
>
> It's one of the worst designs from a usability perspective. Yes, it's on
> every Unix system out there. Yes, it's very complex and can be powerful
> and can be extended to do a million things. Yes, you can train yourself
> so you learn it well enough so that the interface is not a problem
> anymore.
> But all that does not negate the basic fact that it's one of the most
> un-intuitive and essentially broken user interface designs ever. But
> we're stuck with it, which is unfortunate.
>
> Note: I'm not an Emacs fan. :-)
Looking in perspective vi grew up with UNIX. At times when
the output device just tilted from printers to CRTs the UNIX
savvy perceived efficiency mainly in terms of reusing the
legacy knowledge of ed, ex, and regex as well as resources,
execution time, and fast and reliable command and display
time on slow machines and interfaces. In these regards vi(m)
simply excelled then as it does today.
An intuitive interface shortens the learning curve.
An efficient interface becomes a concern after that. vi came
to serve in an environment where most were looking simply for
efficiency, the way they perceived it back then. And some of
those rules are still effective today.
Of course I use vim to write this email. :)
Cheers,
Mihai
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