Not all vi's are created equal

[A. Khattri]

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005, Matthew Carpenter wrote:

> I would assume that Gentoo leaves the vi configuration as it comes from the
> developers.

How do you know it doesn't?

> Yuck.  I do not like nano or pico or any other small-time
> editors (that's a joke, no flames please)  But I'm thankful to be spoiled by
> SuSE and Caldera.

You have the choice, of course, in Gentoo to install whatever editor you
want - there are several different versions of vi for example.

> On Ubuntu, I selected it for install, but from the command line it thinks I'm
> nuts.  Of *course* there's a command or filename "vi" or "vim";  I just
> installed the dang thing!  But I can't find an executable for the life of me.

On a lot of Linux distros, there is one version of vi (it is vim really)
but they usually setup a symbolic link or alias that runs vim even when
you type "vi".


-- 
plumbing n.

 [Unix] Term used for shell code, so called
   because of the prevalence of `pipelines' that feed the output of
   one program to the input of another.  Under Unix, user utilities
   can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable
   collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a
   shell script; this is much less effort than writing C every time,
   and the capability is considered one of Unix's major winning
   features.  A few other OSs such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar
   facilities.  Esp. used in the construction `hairy plumbing'
   (see hairy).  "You can kluge together a basic spell-checker
   out of sort(1), comm(1), and tr(1) with a
   little plumbing."  See also tee.