Re: UTP Revisited: scoping the project

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 04:30:10PM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Larry Kollar wrote on Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 09:33:02AM -0400:
> 
> > I've not used another editor where you can pipe chunks of
> > text *ad hoc* through scripts or even awk/perl one-liners.
> 
> That doesn't require vim(1) at all.  I do that all the time
> with vanilla vi(1), for example "!}fmt" to automatically
> line-break a paragraph of text.
> 
> If you are writing a book on a different topic, maybe it would be
> best to not gratuitiously require vim(1), but just use POSIX vi(1)?
> Of course, it's your decision, but you might want to at least
> consider using standard tools, in particular where it is
> tangential to the topic of your book.
> 
> 
> My personal opinion is that the vi(1) family of editors has exactly
> one advantage: that it's the standard editor, standardized by POSIX,
> and hence available on each and every machine you come too.
> Using vim(1) throws away the one advantage that the vi(1) family
> had in the first place...

You probably like nvi then, it's as compat with the original as you could
possibly imagine.  I'm not a fan.  vim is a significant improvement,
infinite undo being just the tip of the iceberg.

The original vi was a wonder in its time, a lot of usefulness in a pretty
small binary.  While I appreciate that, modern machines have more cache,
a lot more cache on the processor, than the machines had in main memory.
vim looked at that and said lets use it.  I like that, it's useful.