vim question

[B1ackwater]

How do you tell vim to change a special character?

Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.

Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.

Vim is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it.
Should have been purged a DECADE+ ago. That goes for
a lot of other weird old text-related stuff you still find in
Linux. Forget latex ... use OpenOffice. Further, faster,
easier.

Yes, I understand retro-enthusiasists, there is a place
for you (hell, I still always load a forth interpreter and
fortran & cobol too). I still like Lazarus/Free-Pascal
a lot (best way to whip up an nice ok GUI program
REAL QUICK btw).

Laz/FP is hideously underrated IMHO. It is all-capable,
WYSIWYG, fully compiled. You can do in a day what
it takes a week/month to do in python/tk or GTK or QT
the hard way. "3rd-gen' systems like Delphi/Laz,
Revelation, Access, where you neatly, simply, build
GUI forms/interfaces were/are The Holy Grail. The
last decade+ offers NOTHING so straightforward
and to the point. Gee, let's write 10000 lines of
html/php/javascript/css one line at a time by hand ...
yea, what an "improvement" ..............

WAY back in the dinosaur era, I wrote an x86 editor in
ASSEMBLER, heavily leveraging the existing IBM/BIOS
routines, that was pretty much like nano and notepad.
This was vastly better than 'edlin' - common on the PCs
of the era. There is NO reason to put up with early 80s
el-crappo line editors unless you have some weird
masochistic fetish.

Oh yea, you do NOT have to edit /etc/sudoers with
'visudo' no matter the propaganda.... just be careful
with nano.

[The Doctor]

Post by B1ackwater

How do you tell vim to change a special character?

Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.
Vim is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it.
Should have been purged a DECADE+ ago. That goes for
a lot of other weird old text-related stuff you still find in
Linux. Forget latex ... use OpenOffice. Further, faster,
easier.
Yes, I understand retro-enthusiasists, there is a place
for you (hell, I still always load a forth interpreter and
fortran & cobol too). I still like Lazarus/Free-Pascal
a lot (best way to whip up an nice ok GUI program
REAL QUICK btw).
Laz/FP is hideously underrated IMHO. It is all-capable,
WYSIWYG, fully compiled. You can do in a day what
it takes a week/month to do in python/tk or GTK or QT
the hard way. "3rd-gen' systems like Delphi/Laz,
Revelation, Access, where you neatly, simply, build
GUI forms/interfaces were/are The Holy Grail. The
last decade+ offers NOTHING so straightforward
and to the point. Gee, let's write 10000 lines of
html/php/javascript/css one line at a time by hand ...
yea, what an "improvement" ..............
WAY back in the dinosaur era, I wrote an x86 editor in
ASSEMBLER, heavily leveraging the existing IBM/BIOS
routines, that was pretty much like nano and notepad.
This was vastly better than 'edlin' - common on the PCs
of the era. There is NO reason to put up with early 80s
el-crappo line editors unless you have some weird
masochistic fetish.
Oh yea, you do NOT have to edit /etc/sudoers with
'visudo' no matter the propaganda.... just be careful
with nano.

I will try nano on BSD .

[B1ackwater]

Post by The Doctor

Post by B1ackwater

How do you tell vim to change a special character?

Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.
Vim is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it.
Should have been purged a DECADE+ ago. That goes for
a lot of other weird old text-related stuff you still find in
Linux. Forget latex ... use OpenOffice. Further, faster,
easier.
Yes, I understand retro-enthusiasists, there is a place
for you (hell, I still always load a forth interpreter and
fortran & cobol too). I still like Lazarus/Free-Pascal
a lot (best way to whip up an nice ok GUI program
REAL QUICK btw).
Laz/FP is hideously underrated IMHO. It is all-capable,
WYSIWYG, fully compiled. You can do in a day what
it takes a week/month to do in python/tk or GTK or QT
the hard way. "3rd-gen' systems like Delphi/Laz,
Revelation, Access, where you neatly, simply, build
GUI forms/interfaces were/are The Holy Grail. The
last decade+ offers NOTHING so straightforward
and to the point. Gee, let's write 10000 lines of
html/php/javascript/css one line at a time by hand ...
yea, what an "improvement" ..............
WAY back in the dinosaur era, I wrote an x86 editor in
ASSEMBLER, heavily leveraging the existing IBM/BIOS
routines, that was pretty much like nano and notepad.
This was vastly better than 'edlin' - common on the PCs
of the era. There is NO reason to put up with early 80s
el-crappo line editors unless you have some weird
masochistic fetish.
Oh yea, you do NOT have to edit /etc/sudoers with
'visudo' no matter the propaganda.... just be careful
with nano.

I will try nano on BSD .

Try ? I use it all the time. If you are doing something in a
terminal and need to do a quickie edit of some config file
then nano is the cat's meow. The newer versions even
use ctrl-S to save the file, not just the traditional ctrl-O-enter.
Oh, the block copy is a bit weird, creating the block erases
the line ... so you have to ctrl-K to splice it back right away.
Then you can paste it elsewhere.

Always ALWAYS install nano. If you get some panic state
on boot and get the root terminal option then you can use
nano to easily edit the afflicted files (usually fstab if you
are using OpenSUSE ... it freaks if devices can't be found
while Deb derivatives just give up and proceed). Beats
the living hell out of a line-oriented editor.

ANYWAY, my point was that there are some tools that
are just TOO damned old and can be replaced by more
civilized options. Line-oriented editors are just STUPID
these days. They were stupid in '84 when I wrote the
abovementioned Notepad-like app for funzies. I was
going to write one for the company LSI-11 box/serial-terminal,
but then the PCs came along and were nominally better than
the VIC-20s/PETs/A-IIs and such ........

Still pissed IBM went with the 8088 instead of the 8086.
Yea, I understand the economics, but .....

However the 286's were a big improvement - and 386's
finally broke the one-MIPS barrier.

But the Motorola chips were more agreeable - none of
that segmented memory BS ......

[Eli the Bearded]

Post by B1ackwater
Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.

"ed is the standard editor" was a funnier read.

Post by B1ackwater
Vim is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it.

ls is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it. Use a
graphical file selector like Steve Jobs intended.

Elijah
------
a "Finder" if you will

[The Doctor]

Post by Eli the Bearded

Post by B1ackwater
Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.

"ed is the standard editor" was a funnier read.

Post by B1ackwater
Vim is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it.

ls is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it. Use a
graphical file selector like Steve Jobs intended.
Elijah
------
a "Finder" if you will

Oh nice! A Flame war!

[rust buckett]

Post by Eli the Bearded

Post by B1ackwater
Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.

"ed is the standard editor" was a funnier read.

Post by B1ackwater
Vim is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it.

ls is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it. Use a
graphical file selector like Steve Jobs intended.
Elijah
------
a "Finder" if you will

lol. And stay away from cd, rm, mv, cp, etc!

Btw, the last commit on Github for vim was 8 hours ago. I'm not sure
what you mean by dinosaur.

[Andreas Kohlbach]

Post by B1ackwater

How do you tell vim to change a special character?

Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.

You as Forte Agent user on Windows sure know how to remove packages. ;-)
Hint: rm is not the way.

Post by B1ackwater
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.
Vim is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it.
Should have been purged a DECADE+ ago. That goes for
a lot of other weird old text-related stuff you still find in
Linux. Forget latex ... use OpenOffice. Further, faster,
easier.

I use LibreOffice for text, *if* the other side needs DOCX or similar
format. LO takes 20 secs on my DINOSAUR PC to come up. vim a split
second.

But then, looks like a troll attempt here...

[Melzzzzz]

Post by Andreas Kohlbach

Post by B1ackwater

How do you tell vim to change a special character?

Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.

You as Forte Agent user on Windows sure know how to remove packages. ;-)
Hint: rm is not the way.

Post by B1ackwater
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.
Vim is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it.
Should have been purged a DECADE+ ago. That goes for
a lot of other weird old text-related stuff you still find in
Linux. Forget latex ... use OpenOffice. Further, faster,
easier.

I use LibreOffice for text, *if* the other side needs DOCX or similar
format. LO takes 20 secs on my DINOSAUR PC to come up. vim a split
second.

I use wps office as it has better compatibility with ms office. Also has
softmaker.

Post by Andreas Kohlbach
But then, looks like a troll attempt here...

That's for sure as vim is main editor :P
(I edit this with vim :)

[Andreas Kohlbach]

Post by Melzzzzz

Post by Andreas Kohlbach
But then, looks like a troll attempt here...

That's for sure as vim is main editor :P
(I edit this with vim :)

Was using vim too when reading news with slrn like you. Using Emacs Gnus
since almost two decades since then.

Still I wonder. Emacs is a nice program, but lacks a decent text
editor. ;-)

[Melzzzzz]

Post by Andreas Kohlbach

Post by Melzzzzz

Post by Andreas Kohlbach
But then, looks like a troll attempt here...

That's for sure as vim is main editor :P
(I edit this with vim :)

Was using vim too when reading news with slrn like you. Using Emacs Gnus
since almost two decades since then.
Still I wonder. Emacs is a nice program, but lacks a decent text
editor. ;-)

I used Emacs on Unix hated vi then (in 90es);)
But vim, they convinced me to switch from Joe ;)

[B1ackwater]

On Tue, 05 Jan 2021 17:32:39 -0500, Andreas Kohlbach

Post by Andreas Kohlbach

Post by B1ackwater

How do you tell vim to change a special character?

Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.

You as Forte Agent user on Windows sure know how to remove packages. ;-)
Hint: rm is not the way.

I love Forte Agent ... best newsreader ever. Don't care WHAT
system it was originally writ for.

However it runs just fine under WINE ...

[Andreas Kohlbach]

Post by B1ackwater
I love Forte Agent ... best newsreader ever. Don't care WHAT
system it was originally writ for.

Ever tried any other?

I used FA decades ago when using Windows 95/8. After fully switching to
Linux in 2000 I went from slrn (with vim) to Emacs Gnus. Although I still
prefer vim over Emacs. Yes I know you can use vim in Gnus.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Post by Andreas Kohlbach

Post by B1ackwater

How do you tell vim to change a special character?

Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.

You as Forte Agent user on Windows sure know how to remove packages. ;-)
Hint: rm is not the way.

Post by B1ackwater
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.
Vim is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it.
Should have been purged a DECADE+ ago. That goes for
a lot of other weird old text-related stuff you still find in
Linux. Forget latex ... use OpenOffice. Further, faster,
easier.

I use LibreOffice for text, *if* the other side needs DOCX or similar
format. LO takes 20 secs on my DINOSAUR PC to come up. vim a split
second.
But then, looks like a troll attempt here...

Horse for courses. I wouldn't write a book in vi. But I wouldn't edit a
config file in a word processor either.
Years ago a twat sysadmin used Emacs for everything. Instead of vi.
told him to edit /etc/aliases to make a new email group., Asked him why
he hadn't done it. He said he had. well normally changes propagate
instantly - if you use vi, because it edits the active file
Emacs doesn't, It creates a new file and renames the old one ..but
sendmail didn't know that, did it?

[Roger Blake]

Post by B1ackwater
Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.

No thanks. I've been using vi for nearly 40 years and it's burned deep
into muscle memory. Don't even have to think about what keys to hit while
using it.

--

[The Doctor]

Post by Roger Blake

Post by B1ackwater
Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.

No thanks. I've been using vi for nearly 40 years and it's burned deep
into muscle memory. Don't even have to think about what keys to hit while
using it.

Nice to see you again.

Post by Roger Blake
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roger Blake (Posts from Google Groups killfiled due to excess spam.)
The US Census, what info must you give? -- http://censusfacts.info
Don't talk to cops! -- http://www.DontTalkToCops.com
Badges don't grant extra rights -- http://www.CopBlock.org
The facts about Climate Change -- http://www.RealClimateScience.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Very important sig!

[B1ackwater]

Post by The Doctor

Post by Roger Blake

Post by B1ackwater
Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.

No thanks. I've been using vi for nearly 40 years and it's burned deep
into muscle memory. Don't even have to think about what keys to hit while
using it.

Nice to see you again.

I'm sure he "just knows" how to use vi/vim .... but that's
no good for all the newbies we need to bring in to the
Linux/BSD universe to keep it strong and independent.

We're talking "The Future" here - and there are a couple
of STRONG (for mega-profit) competitors involved that
have the cojones (and lawyers) to claim their products
are somehow superior/secure. Such a foundation is
but thin frangible glass and leaves the cyberuniverse
totally vulnerable to bad actors. NOT a good plan.

I made a joke a few weeks ago about spiffing-up
Plan-9 to meet current needs. It was not entirely
a joke. A definite "alternative" approach, well outside
the current spectrum of potential patent/ownershipIProp
claims, that is still rather "Linux-like".

And don't forget "BeOS" ....

And OS-9 is yet another thing that could be spiffed
up, in some structural/op respects nicer and faster
than Linux/Unix. Alas it's commercial, but a functional
clone COULD be writ rather quickly.

[The Doctor]

Post by B1ackwater

Post by The Doctor

Post by Roger Blake

Post by B1ackwater
Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.

No thanks. I've been using vi for nearly 40 years and it's burned deep
into muscle memory. Don't even have to think about what keys to hit while
using it.

Nice to see you again.

I'm sure he "just knows" how to use vi/vim .... but that's
no good for all the newbies we need to bring in to the
Linux/BSD universe to keep it strong and independent.
We're talking "The Future" here - and there are a couple
of STRONG (for mega-profit) competitors involved that
have the cojones (and lawyers) to claim their products
are somehow superior/secure. Such a foundation is
but thin frangible glass and leaves the cyberuniverse
totally vulnerable to bad actors. NOT a good plan.
I made a joke a few weeks ago about spiffing-up
Plan-9 to meet current needs. It was not entirely
a joke. A definite "alternative" approach, well outside
the current spectrum of potential patent/ownershipIProp
claims, that is still rather "Linux-like".
And don't forget "BeOS" ....
And OS-9 is yet another thing that could be spiffed
up, in some structural/op respects nicer and faster
than Linux/Unix. Alas it's commercial, but a functional
clone COULD be writ rather quickly.

Important sig/.sig missing.

[Andreas Kohlbach]

Post by Roger Blake

Post by B1ackwater
Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.

No thanks. I've been using vi for nearly 40 years and it's burned deep
into muscle memory. Don't even have to think about what keys to hit while

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I like that term.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Andreas Kohlbach

Post by Roger Blake

Post by B1ackwater
Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.

No thanks. I've been using vi for nearly 40 years and it's burned deep
into muscle memory. Don't even have to think about what keys to hit while

^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I like that term.

Me too. It's been around for a while.

I know that I really have vi burned into my fingers when I find
myself on another editor, and when I want to move down in the
screen a string of j's appear.

[Andreas Kohlbach]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Andreas Kohlbach

Post by Roger Blake

Post by B1ackwater
Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.
Alternatively, make a symlink and redirect vi/vim to nano.

No thanks. I've been using vi for nearly 40 years and it's burned deep
into muscle memory. Don't even have to think about what keys to hit while

^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I like that term.

Me too. It's been around for a while.
I know that I really have vi burned into my fingers when I find
myself on another editor, and when I want to move down in the
screen a string of j's appear.

Same here. Just didn't know a term to describe it - until now. :-)

[B1ackwater]

-- trimmed followups to just comp.os.linux.misc
<snip>

Post by B1ackwater
Oh yea, you do NOT have to edit /etc/sudoers with
'visudo' no matter the propaganda.... just be careful
with nano.

Ignore this advice, just read the man for visudo, you can
set it to use any editor you want. Editing it directly can
cause issues.

All right.

He's wrong. I suspect he wants you to suffer :-)

Maybe next he'll want you to edit fstab using a
hex editor like way way on back in the good 'ole
days .....

There's always the wonderful old panel switches
option like on the Altairs (Bill Gate's first taste of
money) ....... set, store, advance counter ...

HA - found a pic of IBMs first real transistor-based
computer. This was a special project for the Navy
code-breaking office. A bunch of discrete transistors,
hand-wired to resistors and diodes, on a "card".
However the card base had no contacts - it was
connected via a row of pins further up on the card.
The card base was just to hold the thing in position.

Look up the IBM 360s ... LOOKS like a bunch of
"chips" on a board - but inside each "chip" is a few
discrete components - transitor/resistors/diodes -
basically one of the flavors of logic gates.

No wonder the CPU box was so big. What's amazing
is that such minimal electronics were still good enough
to cope with multi-user/multi-tasking ... enough to get
us to the moon. My highest respects to the Arrow-tie
generation of 50's computer/systems engineers. They
took SO little and leveraged it SO much .....

[Andreas Kohlbach]

Post by B1ackwater
There's always the wonderful old panel switches
option like on the Altairs (Bill Gate's first taste of
money) ....... set, store, advance counter ...

First big money. He and Allan were working on a computer counting street
traffic. Company was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data

[FR]

Post by B1ackwater
Vim is DINOSAUR AGE. Get RID of it. Do NOT entertain it.
Should have been purged a DECADE+ ago. That goes for
a lot of other weird old text-related stuff you still find in
Linux. Forget latex ... use OpenOffice. Further, faster,
easier.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Vim has "modes" which is totally anachronistic and unthinkable
with current systems.

Latex is not misplaced, however.

But having said this I am still against all ridiculous "modern"
D.E. development. GNOME, KDE, etc., are useless exercises in
developer vainglory.

[rust buckett]

Post by B1ackwater

How do you tell vim to change a special character?

Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.

Lol. That is terrible advice. I use vim every day. I'm not sure you
understand what programs like vim and emacs are for. Pico is probably
just as old, I know it's been around for a very long time, but it is a
very simple, limited editor.

Vim and emacs are for text manipulation, not formatting and prettifying.
Also, I do all of my script writing, email, programming, list making,
journaling, and even composing a follow-up to this post in vim.

As far as how to change a special character, go to something like
unicode.org and find the unicode for the character that you want. Then I
think it's CTRL-u and the octal code for the character. Google how to
enter unicode characters or something like that. It's a little obscure,
but it's not hard to find. Sometimes you can even copy and paste the
character directly from a site like unicode.org.

[rust buckett]

Post by rust buckett

Post by B1ackwater

How do you tell vim to change a special character?

Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and
fucking DELETE vim.

Lol. That is terrible advice. I use vim every day. I'm not sure you
understand what programs like vim and emacs are for. Pico is probably
just as old, I know it's been around for a very long time, but it is a
very simple, limited editor.

Correction: you were talking about Nano, not Pico. Pico is the editor
for Pine MUA which Nano is based on. They look very similar.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by rust buckett
As far as how to change a special character, go to something like
unicode.org and find the unicode for the character that you want. Then I
think it's CTRL-u and the octal code for the character. Google how to
enter unicode characters or something like that. It's a little obscure,
but it's not hard to find. Sometimes you can even copy and paste the
character directly from a site like unicode.org.

I put "UTF-8 character set" into DuckDuckGo (my machine is a Google-free
zone), which provides several options. I should probably bookmark
https://www.w3schools.com/charsets/ref_html_utf8.asp since that's
the one I usually use. You can call up any character there, and
copy and paste it directly into your document without having to worry
about octal codes, control keys, etc. I don't know whether you can
paste UTF-8 characters into vim, but I keep a GUI text editor like
Mousepad handy for these cases.

[rust buckett]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by rust buckett
As far as how to change a special character, go to something like
unicode.org and find the unicode for the character that you want. Then I
think it's CTRL-u and the octal code for the character. Google how to
enter unicode characters or something like that. It's a little obscure,
but it's not hard to find. Sometimes you can even copy and paste the
character directly from a site like unicode.org.

I put "UTF-8 character set" into DuckDuckGo (my machine is a Google-free
zone), which provides several options. I should probably bookmark
https://www.w3schools.com/charsets/ref_html_utf8.asp since that's
the one I usually use. You can call up any character there, and
copy and paste it directly into your document without having to worry
about octal codes, control keys, etc. I don't know whether you can
paste UTF-8 characters into vim, but I keep a GUI text editor like
Mousepad handy for these cases.

I've done it that way too. In that case it's not actually vim that
allows me to paste in the special character but Termite. I can enter
insert mode in vim and then ctrl+alt+v paste in the character. It's
hacky, but it works. I was just excited to enter unicode character
directly when I figured that out.

[ziprane]

Post by rust buckett

How do you tell vim to change a special character?

Um ... let me give you some advice. Got to /usr/bin and fucking
DELETE vim.

Lol. That is terrible advice. I use vim every day. I'm not sure you
understand what programs like vim and emacs are for. Pico is probably
just as old, I know it's been around for a very long time, but it is a
very simple, limited editor.

I Agree.

Post by rust buckett
Vim and emacs are for text manipulation, not formatting and prettifying.
Also, I do all of my script writing, email, programming, list making,
journaling, and even composing a follow-up to this post in vim.
As far as how to change a special character, go to something like
unicode.org and find the unicode for the character that you want. Then I
think it's CTRL-u and the octal code for the character. Google how to
enter unicode characters or something like that. It's a little obscure,
but it's not hard to find. Sometimes you can even copy and paste the
character directly from a site like unicode.org.

I Agree.

[Russell]

How do you tell vim to change a special character?

I remembered how to do it! In insert mode, type ctrl-v, then enter u
followed by the octal code for the character.