On Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:33:04 -0300, nemesis wrote:

>> People use the tools they're most comfortable with, and sometimes more
>> than one.
> 
> Sure, feeling comfortable with a beautiful, more familiar face is a nice
> thing to get.  Even if underpowered, like by choosing gedit vs
> vim/emacs. :)

"Underpowered" though is in the eyes of the beholder - and dependent 
heavily on the task.  I don't know about you, but I wouldn't go and get a 
pneumatic hammer to tap an anchor into the wall to hang a spice rack.

> Not all editing tasks would benefit from vim/emacs -- like short, plain
> typing with little editing other than backspace -- but those that do get
> a serious boost from a proper tool.

Sure.

>> Hell, at times, I use awk for editing.  If I knew sed better, I'd
>> probably use that, too.
> 
> Like Perl, they're excellent batch text editing tools.

I find Perl to be a bit heavy, honestly.  The extensibility is useful 
(and I do use it for some things, though I'm more comfortable in awk) at 
times, but if I want to do just some basic parsing, Perl seems like 
overkill.

>> People doing change-on-the-fly editing using pipes might say that it's
>> noobs who use crutches like vim or emacs.
> 
> Batch editing with pipes and sed has no place in today's fast-paced
> interactive programming.  

Oh, I don't know about that.  I had to process a couple hundred e-mail 
messages, generate PDFs of the contents, and re-send them to myself.  
Easiest way was to export the messages to a text file and run them 
through a few awk scripts - using pipes.  Fed the results into another 
awk script that mailed the stuff back to me.

sed has it's place in there as well, and probably some of what I did 
could've been done more easily with sed.

>> Remember that we all had to start somewhere, and those of us who've
>> been in the biz for 15 years or more (which I think is you and me both)
>> tend to forget that the landscape has changed in that time.
> 
> I think I've been keeping up with new technological advances just fine.
>   And yet I don't see any text editing tool marvels as those 2, even in
> high end modernese IDEs.

Well, that could well be because you're used to the tools you use. :)

>> Our way may be
>> better for us, but that doesn't necessarily make it better for
>> everyone.
> 
> I don't think so.  The day I can select and copy one long SQL select
> query with a mouse just as easily as y} or go back after a search to the
> exact point I was 700 lines above with Ctrl+o is the day I'll eat my
> underwear. :)

There again, you're framing it in terms of your experience.  I'm talking 
about from someone else's POV.  That's much harder to judge for most 
people because they're not used to standing in someone else's shoes and 
saying that the other POV might have a point.

>> can't move a mouse that fast, so I tend to not even use menus in GNOME
>> (I tend to use ALT+F2 and type the program name in because it's faster
>> for me).
> 
> I control my Linux box from the always open gnome-terminal.  My regular
> programs are always in bash_history, so it's just a matter of Ctrl-R'ing
> for them. :)

Heh, same here.  Except I use tcsh and ! - but same concept.

>>  That doesn't mean that for my stepson - who also types rather
>> quickly at 21 - is a lesser computer user because he uses the mouse
>> more than I do.  He's just got a different workflow for the things he
>> does.
> 
> I think he's losing a lot. ;)

Oh, I don't think so - he's quite adept with the tools he uses, both on 
Windows and on Linux.  Just because he doesn't do things the way you and 
I do doesn't mean he's missing out - he might say the same about us 
because we are "stuck in our old ways of doing things". ;-)

Jim

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