From: Csaba Henk <csaba@..._for_avoiding_spam.org>
Date: 2005-02-20T10:34:45+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] FXIrb 0.14 - a Win32 GUI wrapper around IRB

On 2005-02-19, Stephen Kellett <snail@objmedia.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> In message <42169773.60505@neurogami.com>, James Britt 
><jamesUNDERBARb@neurogami.com> writes
>>And Gvim is my editor of choice.
>
> Thats a vi variant? Ouch.

Although I tend to migrate to emacs from vim, I say vim is an excellent
editor. It's just genious how its authors took the vi heritage and
turned it to something what is full of features and one can achieve
efficiency with it within a few hours.

The best illustration for the power of vim is cream, see at
http://cream.sf.net. It's a macro package for vim which turns vim to a
totally end-user-friendly, non-modal editor. When using it, you don't
need to know anything about vi.

Why would the end user want to use cream instead of the hundred other
end-user-friendly editors? Because of one killer feature of vim: the
swapfile. It's a(n almost) real-time saved copy of the actual state of
the edited file's buffer (though "saved copy" is not the most exact
term, as its some kind of binary format), from which you can easily
restore your changes in case of a system/editor crash, and which
silently disappears upon clean exit (no dozens of backup files
polluting your directories, like with emacs).

You could give a try to cream (there is a one-click installer for
Windows), then re-evaluate the "vi variant? ouch" statement.

Csaba