[ltp] linux web publishing tool ??

[Rob Bell]

tharter@rhombus.net wrote:

> Honestly, I just cannot tolerate VI, its interface is appalingly crude. You 
> have no idea what the next keystroke is going to do, maybe your in insert 
> mode, maybe your not... It just violates every decent convention for human 
> factors in software engineering. The design made sense when you were editing 
> on TTYs and very slow half-duplex serial consoles, but its just plain buggery 
> today, and building on top of it hasn't really made it better, just more 
> complicated IMHO.

Well there's always two sides to the story...  If you once get used to 
vi (whose commands are definitely not intuitive) it rapidly becomes a 
VERY useful tool.  The commands are simple, powerful and do exactly what 
you want them to do.  They might not be where you think they should be, 
but once they're in your head they work wonderfully.  I've used vi since 
maybe '88 and wouldn't part with it for anything these days.  Sure, I 
use other editors when my needs aren't plain text editing (Word docs or 
HTML pages), but for fast and powerful editing of text vi is awesome. 
Show me another editor that harnesses the power of regular expressions 
to do powerful search and replace functions in a few keystrokes.

I'm sure your same arguments could be used to knock PhotoShop too... but 
that's still undeniably a great tool for people who master it.

Rob