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

I like that idea. The first time I used linux I had a TNT2, meaning that in order to get 3d acceleration I had to manually edit the config file, as well as when I was setting up my remote control to act as a mouse. Actually speaking of command line editing, do you think something on vi or other command line editors would be useful? This is not the job for me, I really hate vi. Currently I am using mcedit from midnight commander because its so so simple.

I don't know that there's a better site than /., but you might also want to consider linking to linux.org, which is a pretty good site, with lots of links to useful resources. I think that both of your warnings are probably quite appropriate. If you ignore the trolls, flamers, and general weirdos, /. is quite a useful, and sometimes even, *gasp*, insightful place.

Another question is should this be one gargantuan document, or should it be broken down into separate pages? That probably doesn't make much of a big difference now, but it is something to be thought about.

Rebus

An editors section would probably be somewhat useful. There are currently hundreds of text editors, each aimed at different groups of people. There are GNU Emacs, XEmacs, all the vi variants, pico, gedit, mcedit, joe, ae, ad nauseum (that's not an editor, you understand, although it very well could be ). I can remember sitting down to my first linux install (a 5-floppy install of Debian 1.3) and wondering "how the ... do I edit text?!"

Rebus

I've taken /. off the links list because I was there earlier and I relised just how confusing it is really.

As for text editors, I just don't understand how vi came to be so popular. Ahh well. An editors section would be huge wouldn't it. That will require thought I think.

I thought that the best way to do things would be to have each sub-topic as a seperate page, otherwise the thing is going ot get massive, then we can just link them all together. This also means that anyone can write an entry off their own backs, if you understand what I mean.

I read Slashdot, but yes it can be confusing... best left for a little while after the initial experience, that.

Vi is popular because it's so powerful. I don't use it myself as Emacs provides more power than I use, but vi is arguably even more powerful than Emacs, and certainly does some more complex tasks a great deal more quickly.

Maybe one of us should write a page called "Why Emacs is the best text editor on the face of the earth", and another write a page called "Why vi is the best text editor on the face of the earth". Yeah. That'll work...

Rebus

why is vi so popular?

because it is small, powerfull, and so old (in it's origins) that it (or a clone) is installed on just about every unix machine out there.

vi signified the change from line editing to screen editing.

emacs is a generation later, and is more of a word processor than a text editor. it is also very large, and thus is often not included in the default install. This makes it less usefull.

because vi is installed on just about every machine and the config files are text based, knowing vi (plus a lot of knowledge) makes it possible to get a system from the point of booting, but barely working, back into being fully working.

hence it's popularity. however it is neither pretty, or particularly intuitive, hence the popularty of emacs.

I hope this covers it.

fair enough then. It seems strange though that something like vi would have been the first when it seems that you would expect something along the lines of the old dos edit to have been invented first and always on systems, I mean how small could you make that! I am from the school of though that small is better so I don't use emacs as it is huge adn has no need to be in my opinion. I'm sticking with mcedit. It does exactly what it needs to.

Emacs isn't all that intuitive either, but vi is even worse - although to be honest, the only reason it's problematic is because most computer users are brought up on programs that operate totally differently. If they'd learned on vi, they'd find anything else weird.

As a lightweight editor I prefer jove. Behaves like emacs but without the bloat, so it'll fit on a rescue disk.

vi wasn't actually first. before that was a tool analagous to dos edlin, a line editor. you had to say which line of the file you want to edit, and then edit that line only.

vi came along and built a screen editor on top of this, so was a lot more popular.

then those nice people at FSF wrote VIM (vi improved) which was even less horrible.

because these tools all use the same set of commands, they naturally followed on from each other, while at the same time providing for gracefull degredation.

While I don't think that vi is actually very nice, it is undeniably usefull to know how to use it.

especially considering how many systems have it installed.

Don't even think about what was before vi!!!!!

* shudders *

I would like to say thanks for the link to my linux pages.

If anyone has any suggestions for improvements, or comments, then I would be pleased to hear them.

Hmm, all quiet on the western front? Is everyone like me mind numbingly busy at the moment?

Ho hum... Four months later; are you still mind-numbingly busy?