Yay, I'm back in vi(m)!
It's been a favorite place for decades.
I've loved typing since taking a class therein in high school. Ages ago. Variously-colored IBM Selectric's in the classroom. I want to say the teacher's name was Barbara Belden, but that's almost sounding too movie actress a name to have been it. But I can still picture her, that's for sure.
On the home front my parents had gotten my sister a Sears electric as a Christmas gift, and I was damned jealous. But I horned in on it - being one of the things older brothers excel at.
My next stop was an ancient Olympia manual that I bought on campus during "university" period. Heavy. I can still picture the scene carrying it out of the place, and roughly across the street to the dorm building.
I typed letters on that to one of my more inner circle high school friends (I still don't care for the word 'bestie') for quite some, surely into when I'd already been working with files on computers. Not everyone was connected to something that could do email yet, so the paper snail stuff still prevailed.
But eventually that friend could finally email, and that was the end of a glorious paper era.
Maybe a year or so later a son and his friends wrecked that beautiful Olympia machine by moving the carriage back and forth against its metallic will.
But I'd long been down unix paths, and thus had encountered varieties of terminal mode editors. I definitely recall agonizing over whether to vi(m) or emacs. The programmer in me preferred the latter. But then I eventually found ways to do what I needed in vi(m) (e.g. ":29,31!shell-script"). And it was so much lighter, which mattered back when hard drives weren't a meaningless cost factor, or was into backing things up to external magnetic storage cards: transfer times could seemingly rise into "half of forever".
vi(m) won.
(Okay, the parentheses heaviness of lisp-iness was a factor too....)
Gosh, thinking about those days has me remembering "Slackware", then distros popping up here and there. Had to try 'em. Had to. But, oh, the terror of agonizing over whether the time being spent (long install, initial boot, degrees of setup) was in vain!
It's been a favorite place for decades.
I've loved typing since taking a class therein in high school. Ages ago. Variously-colored IBM Selectric's in the classroom. I want to say the teacher's name was Barbara Belden, but that's almost sounding too movie actress a name to have been it. But I can still picture her, that's for sure.
On the home front my parents had gotten my sister a Sears electric as a Christmas gift, and I was damned jealous. But I horned in on it - being one of the things older brothers excel at.
My next stop was an ancient Olympia manual that I bought on campus during "university" period. Heavy. I can still picture the scene carrying it out of the place, and roughly across the street to the dorm building.
I typed letters on that to one of my more inner circle high school friends (I still don't care for the word 'bestie') for quite some, surely into when I'd already been working with files on computers. Not everyone was connected to something that could do email yet, so the paper snail stuff still prevailed.
But eventually that friend could finally email, and that was the end of a glorious paper era.
Maybe a year or so later a son and his friends wrecked that beautiful Olympia machine by moving the carriage back and forth against its metallic will.
But I'd long been down unix paths, and thus had encountered varieties of terminal mode editors. I definitely recall agonizing over whether to vi(m) or emacs. The programmer in me preferred the latter. But then I eventually found ways to do what I needed in vi(m) (e.g. ":29,31!shell-script"). And it was so much lighter, which mattered back when hard drives weren't a meaningless cost factor, or was into backing things up to external magnetic storage cards: transfer times could seemingly rise into "half of forever".
vi(m) won.
(Okay, the parentheses heaviness of lisp-iness was a factor too....)
Gosh, thinking about those days has me remembering "Slackware", then distros popping up here and there. Had to try 'em. Had to. But, oh, the terror of agonizing over whether the time being spent (long install, initial boot, degrees of setup) was in vain!