[Beowulf] Re: Religious wars

[Mark Kosmowski]

>
>
> Bob Drzyzgula <bob at drzyzgula.org> writes:
> >> > and I can assure you that it didn't have no stinkin' Emacs;
> >>
> >> It most certainly did, you simply didn't install it. :)
> >
> > Absolutely SunOS 1.1 did not include any version of Emacs.
>
> No, it didn't *include* it. As I said, we got gosmacs from
> Unipress. The environment I was at bought it because they had so many
> Dec-20 heads that they needed it. I'm sorry if I was ambiguous on
> that.
>
>
> --
> Perry E. Metzger                perry at piermont.com
>
>

I dabbled with Linux as an enthusiast as a wee lad back in the 80386
days.  Took a C in the Unix environment class at college back in the
late 1990s and the instructor taught vi since "There's always vi - but
maybe not something else - you can read chapter 11 [of the Sobell text
we were using - the emacs chapter - going from memory so chapter
number may be wrong] on your own if you're interested."  I briefly
played a little with emacs on my own but having no compelling reason
to use it didn't get very far.

Right now I use kate for most user level editing and vi for most root
editing or editing over ssh.   I also try to remember to use a sed
script (I even modified the one that came with the O'Reilly book to
span directories semi-recursively!) for making minor changes to
bunches of input files all at once.  Sometimes (for n < 10 or so) this
just gets done manually though.

I will agree [with rgb?] that OpenOffice takes a hideously long time
to load, but, in fairness, this is, to an extent, an apples and
oranges comparison.  Kind of like using bash for a quick arithmetic
calculation vs. firing up Mathematica or a similar program.

Having said all this, I'm not a programmer by any stretch.  The best
units for measuring my coding productivity is projects / decade.  I do
tend to try the gui admin tools before going to the text files, though
/etc/hosts and /etc/fstab are pretty common to at least read when
something gets broken.  In fact, I do so little programming that it
has been a year since I've compiled anything - running into some
issues with a bunch of upgrades - if by two weekends from now I don't
even have a serial CPMD 3.13.1 running I'm going to break down and
seek help from the appropriate lists.  Want to wrestle with it a
little more - I feel very, very close.

Mark Kosmowski