Post #1891397
2026-05-02 19:14 UTC
At the risk of restarting the Editor wars (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war) from days of yore, I find it interesting that emacs wasn’t even in your list of contenders. I hear it mentioned less frequently these days, so perhaps it’s going by the wayside?
For the record, I’m a vi/vim user! I had the privilege of being taught to use it by an RFC-writing greybeard decades ago, and have used it without thinking ever since.
For those who find themselves on a machine with only vi/vim, or want to learn, here’s a quick primer when editing a file (usually done by typing “vi foo.txt” in a shell) –
:q! …Force quit vi (:q also works – gentler!)
:wq! …Save file and quit vi
i (then type characters) …insert text at current position
A (then type characters) …Insert at end of current line
G …go to first character of last line in the file
/foo …search for first occurrence of “foo” in the file (hit / again to find additional instances)
x …Delete character under cursor
:56 …Go to line 56
yy …Copy the line the cursor is currently on into the buffer
p … Paste the buffer
r (then type character) …Replace character under cursor
Second nature after a bit of practice! I used torment guy who insisted on using ed. That was… odd.
Replies (4)
-
@SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 2026-05-02 19:24
Not jn my case but part of emacs downward trending mind share could be due to rms himself
-
@Gonzako@lemmy.world 2026-05-02 22:05
:h?
-
@kaiyo@piefed.ca 2026-05-02 21:59
Yeah but op was comparing editors, not OS’s. Https://emacsos.dev
-
@JustEnoughDucks@slrpnk.net 2026-05-04 06:50
Been using it (not often beyond basics for home server container administration) for years but I always get confused with searching vs search and replace vs global search / :%s// :g//p (grep was named after this one IIRC, Global Regular Expression Print) And often I just use :%s to search and highlight all instances and don’t press enter because I forget the others.