h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Having tried both, I come down in favour of Vi. The fact it's installed as standard on SCO Openserver (which I have to use at work) was possibly a deciding factor.

But I know (otherwise rational) people who swaer by Emacs and say using anything else is heresy Your choice of editor can say a lot about you.

These days, I use KDE's advanced editor as it does HTML syntax highlighting which I find very useful. Shame it can't help we write better HTML.

Neil.

VI is pretty standard on most unices.

I'd have thought that most modern editors (KDE, GNOME, nedit etc) can do syntax highlighting even emacs can

Is Vi free?

Check out http://www.vim.org for details of VIM, an improved version of Vi (available for a multitude of platfoms).

And Yes, it's free

Neil.

VIM (for that is what runs when you type vi on RedHat Linux) can indeed do syntax highlighting but it's choice of colours leaves a lot to be desired on KDE's default white xterm background. I could change the colours but that seems like an awful lot of hard work when there's a perfectly servicable tool just a couple of mouse clicks away

Neil.

Try changing the xterm (or whatever clone you use) background to black and see if the highlighting works better (same with the GNU ls --color)

You were right, that made it better, but it still seemed over busy.

That said, I grabbed VIM for Windows (I know, but like you I have no choice on OSfor some of my work) and that does quite a reasonable job. Useful to use when I can't edit stuff on a machine running KDE.

Next job: replace vi with Vim on SCO

Neil.

It comes as standard on the OS I use for work, FreeBSD
Still learning the ropes though. I know it can do a lot more than I use it for.

You should be able to change the colours, seems like everything is changeable in unix, you've just got to know what file to edit

The FreeBSD box at home is used soley as a gateway/mail server, so I rarely edit stuff on that.

As I've completely banished Windows from my machine at home (except for the occasional game of Half-Life ) in favour of Linux I've had to learn to use what's available. For editing HTML the gui-based editor in KDE is lovely, for configuration files I still revert to type and use vi/vim.

My one luxury has been Wordperfect Office 2000 for Linux. Okay, some of it runs under emulation using WINE but it does okay. Might have a look at other options in due course, but for now it hit's the spot.

Seemed to have wandered a little off topic there.

Neil.

I've got Linux at home. I use FreeBSD at work because that's what we run on most of the servers. Makes sense as we can test things out on the desktop before moving then to live services.

Just managed to get my linux system to run my window manager of choice (Window Maker), so I'll soon be up to speed again with the new system. I've not tried the Wordperfect stuff on Linux, but it should be OK. I've heard that StarOffice is also quite good.

Topic drift is what happens all the time round these parts.

Back on topic, William Joy, creator of VI also is one of the founders of SUN microsystems, did a lot of work with the original NFS stuff, designed parts of the first SPARC and UltraSPARC processors and is quite an all round clever chap. I did put some comments about this in a forum for the original (unapproved entry) and hoped some kind of footnote might be added, but never mind.

Drifting back off topic.....

The problem with StarOffice is it's one big program and it does insist on taking over the desktop. Makes a mockery of having a window manager. I've used it on FreeBSD, Linux and Windows and couldn't get on with it on any of them. I'm no great fan of Wordperfect either but I was able to buy it over the counter, it was really an impulse buy.

I wanted to use FreeBSD as my workstation environment at home but found the lack of 'native' applications a bit limiting. I probably could have survived if I hadn't wanted to use VMWare to run Windows for one program there isn't a alternative too. I've registered interest in a FreeBSd version of VMWare, if it come about then I may well switch.

So spill the beans Phil, who'd you work for?

Neil.

I work for Clara.Net, the ISP as a sysadmin.
I've not tried VMWare, but it does look interesting.
It's a shame the star office components can't be unbundled and used stand alone. WordPerfect 5.1 with dosemu?

Reading that entry, I have another good flaming topic - at least for Solaris users: xterm or cmdtool.

Can't abide xterm, myself, truly primitive!

Is that Solaris running OpenWindows or CDE
(Give me OpenWindows anyday!)

Ahhh... that explains the FreeBSD. The only other person I know who uses it full time also works for an ISP.

Wordperfect Office for Linux is quite nice. Only used the word processor and the spreadsheet so far and both are servicable. Managed to take my CV from Word into Wordpervet without too much hair pulling.

For FreeBSD Applixware seems to be the hot favourite as it's been ported native (by Walnut Creek) and has a good reputation. Only bummer is there isn't a demo version available.

Neil.

Yesah, FreeBSD just does the job. Nicely packaged as well so it makes it easier to install and upgrade.

If I do need to use any kind of `productivity' apps, I can use one of the many windows boxes round here. The apps which increase my productivity are things like netscape, an email client, ssh, and getting back on topic, vi

Erm. If it uses WINE it's not being emulated...

Okay, emulated may not have been the best word to use.

WP Office 2000 for Linux is effectively windows code running using WINE at least for some of it's parts. There quite a good, if short, explaination in the first issue of Linux User ([Broken link removed by Moderator] along with reviews of Applixware and StarOffice.

Neil.

The point is that to say it runs fine despite partly using WINE makes no sense - it's simple an alternate implementation of the Windows API, and shouldn't have any deficiency running supported API calls - in fact some programs run faster under WINE than under Windows...

Getting way off topic....

My point is that it is billed as "Wordperfect Office 2000 for Linux", which gives the impression it's a native app, which it isn't. I don't really have a problem with it using Wine, but I would have liked to have known that was the case up front.

Neil.