Re: [gentoo-dev] Why not vi?

[Jack Morgan]

On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 08:10:17PM -0400, Eric Moncrieff wrote:
> Hello Gentoo Team,
>
> I installed Gentoo today, and am  largly very impressed by what I see.
> Many of my favourite BSDisms are here, as are most of the vital System
> V features.  In short, great work!
>
> However, there's  one thing I'm really  unclear on.  You  left out any
> mention of  the old  UNIX standard editor,  vi.  I've used  many, many
> different UNIXen over the years,  and the *only* things which *always*
> worked were /bin/sh and /usr/bin/vi.  They were sometimes in different
> places, but vi always, *always* was around somewhere.  Not in Gentoo.
>
> When I  discovered, to my surprise, that  I was forced to  use nano, I
> immediately decided to take your  Portage system for a spin, and typed
> 'emerge  app-editors/vi'.  Vi was  built from  source (though  I'm not
> clear on which particular vi you  used).  However, when I tried to run
> it, it segfaulted.  So I was stuck with nano.
>
> So I  tried 'emerge app-editors/vim', which  built all of X  for me (I
> have to remember the --pretend option).   This was fine, but it took a
> long time, and all I wanted to do was edit my startup scripts.
>
> So now I've got a working vi, which I'm happy about.  Of course, after
> kde finishes building,  I'm going to build emacs, so  I won't be using
> my new  vi very much, but  still...For all this long  time, we've been
> able to  count on vi  as the quick,  omnipresent editor.  But  not for
> Gentoo.


emerge app-editor/nvi works for me. No need for all those dependencies.


-- 
jack_morgan