What's with the website?

[Ed Allen]

On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 03:22:45PM -0500, Nathan Cerny wrote:
> 
> "Real Men use VI."

<Geezer mode>
vi is a line oriented editor 'ex' with a screen update interface tacked
on the front as the vi-mode of the original editor 'ex'.

'ex' stands for "EXpanded" because the students at Berkley expanded the
AT&T editor 'ed' with more commands and a more consistent syntax.

Bill Joy, one of the original Sun founders, added the screen updating
code and switched to "raw mode", meaning that each keypress is sent to
the computer as you type instead of waiting till the ENTER key is pressed.

So much history for such a short thought as...

Intel once supplied a charater oriented editor called 'speed' as part of
their Isis development system which I once used to do something I doubt
'vi' can be coerced into without major programming effort.

I captured a hex dump, similar to 'od -x', to a file and then used 'speed'
on that file to produce assemly language statements to replicate the 4K
byte ROM as as an "include file" of our standard build.

All of this is meant to point out that even if you have a favorite editor
it might fall miserably short on a particular task.  If the person you
are offending knows just one of those imbalances then you could wind up
looking foolish.
</Geezer mode>