tlug: vim, not vi (was: PC Semi)

[John Seebach <jseebach@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" wrote:
> 
> 
> 386SX + vi + virtual consoles is probably a reasonable alternative,
> especially if you can cut and paste GPM selections across VCs, but
> I've never used vi that way so can't recommend it.

I've never tried using GPM and vi with virtual consoles, either, but
for the resource-conscious, I would recommend vim instead of plain vi
as another low-overhead alternative for console use, if you're the
kind of person who can stomach vim's keybindings (I am). You can split
screens and work with multiple buffers, like in Emacs, and GPM will
let you cut and paste between buffers on the same screen no problem.
There are many other nifty modern features like syntax highlighting,
text formatting, and autocommands. As someone who spent 8 hours a day
for 3 years working with stock SCO vi because it was the only option I
had at work, vim was like the first day of spring after an unusually
harsh winter.

This is what I use on my old laptop which grinds and wheezes when I
throw anything that even thinks about X or GUI at it. If you compile
it without a lot of the extra stuff, it's quite slim and fast.

Supposedly, the latest beta version (5.4l or something like that,
check www.vim.org -- the one I'm using is quite stable) adds
multibyte-support, but the only available encoding for Japanese is
SJIS, so I have yet to get it working with Japanese in Kterm and
Kinput2 (if anyone has tried this and had success, let me know. I'd
buy you a beer or two). For me, emacs-mule (another great editor, I
just don't like the keybindings) works a lot better (meaning it works
at all) for Japanese input.

Oh, yeah, and the abovementioned version adds a really nifty GTK gui,
but that's getting beyond the scope of this message.

john
jseebach@example.com
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