Originally posted by mrjohns
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They obviously shouldn't be on a UNIX forum unless they are asking for advice. If you don't want to learn vi then you can't be serious about learning UNIX so get out of the terminal.
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GUI's are not for editing text fast. GUI's specialise is WYSIWYG making things pretty. Not for moving text the fastest possible way.
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Moving text is precisely what editors like BBEdit and Tex-Edit Plus do infinitely faster than vi. In fact the only slow editor i have right now is AbiWord. It shows a telling ignorance of clippings and drag and drop that "moving text" (vs. long regex subs or duplicated macros) would be the misexample chosen.
There is also a reason why every UNIX I know of lets you use a mouse.
I am very familiar with vi, nor is it hard to use, compared to ed. I do most of my quick-and-dirty editing in vi, and use sed for multiple files, unless i have to use awk or perl.
I like the regex capacity of BBEDit, and i have duplicated it with my script "Replace Regex" in Tex-Edit Plus. I use TE for formatted text, but a lot of that is html formatting derived from sophisticated regex/style combinations.
vi is clearly not superior to emacs or xemacs w/r/t plug-ins and modes. In that area it's also clearly inferior to BBEdit.
Moreover, recording in a UNIX command-line editor is a nightmare and with a Mac classic or X application it's a breeze.
Anyone who hates any technology developed after 1970 really won't enjoy OS X.
By the way i am releasing next month both an improved Classic/Dialog Director/Regex Commands version of Replace Regex and an AppleScript Studio version.
Both will handle styled text post-regex sub according to the rules of Tex-Edit Plus. They are slower than the old Replace Regex, but I found myself using BBEdit Lite for unstyled text anyway.