Alison Croggon wrote:
> What is an emac and a vi? I am totally in the dark, I thought an
> emac was a cheap imac.
>
> Best
>
> A
Fit this answer under the general category "Here There Be Monsters."
They are text editors. No resemblance to Word or WordPerfect. You type
ASCII text onto the
screen. Both vi (VIsual editor) and Emacs (Editor MACroS, in name; but
in reality Endlessly messy arduous crusher of spirits) require what can
be a very complex series of keystrokes to enter text, edit, delete, cut,
paste, etc. There is no formatting. However in both you can navigate
and do basic stuff with a minimum of elaborate keywork. Real
cognoscenti (I am not) tend to know the whole command set.
You can use vi and emacs to manually insert HTML code. That's how I
learned to write webpages in 1995--working from a UNIX command line,
using vi and "brute force" HTML code. It worked. I trust it a lot more
than Netscape Composer or even Dreamweaver: both of them lead to excess
code that should be stripped out anyway. In fact I don't trust any
flavor of Netscape to do anything but bollocks up work and take an hour
to load anything. Guess what the company standard is here.
Both editors were designed for UNIX systems. Vi exists in PC versions
as "vim" and a few other clones. Emacs has a PC version as well as a
more visual version called Xemacs, my emacs drug of choice. I gather
there are great internecine wars between and among vi, emacs, and xemacs
proponents. Some would not be caught dead using an editor other than
the one they favor. I do whatever suits my fancy.
Frankly I miss the best text editor I ever used, really a word
processor, Xywrite 3. Xywrite 3 was the basis for Nota Bene, which has
evolved since it "went Windows" into the most complicated word processor
I've ever seen. I bought it for a tax writeoff one year, keep up with
the upgrades, but have a real problem with the elitism of suggesting
that $495 for a program doesn't come with a printed user's guide, just
some help screens. I still have my roots in the print generation.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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