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[one4k4]

You can help this site out by sending in a $5 donation or by including it with your order of other items. Literally hundreds and hundreds of hours have been put into making the site what you see today -- not to count the blood, sweat, and tears involved in coding everything in plain ASCII text in Emacs, night after night!

Things wouldn't have been so bad if you used Vi (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jxh/vi.html). ;)

Come now, I don't want to start a Vi vs. Emacs war, now do I?

[akiy]

Oh, I've used vi for about ten years now, too. But, I'm just more comfortable typinc C-x C-c than :q!, I guess.

Also, a lot of the programming and computational research I did when I was in Japan was done using mule (multi-language emacs) with its kanji henkan features so I got very used to using emacs. I still often use vi, though, for small editing jobs...

Hey, at least I don't rely on an HTML "editor" like Frontpage!

-- Jun

[one4k4]

I haven't gotten nearly as *much* emacs experience as it sounds like you've gotten, but then again I haven't had the need to do multi language editing, which is where (imho) it sounds like emacs shines.

I just like typing in funky regexes and Vi is also something we've got on the mainframe / Unix boxes, so you take what you can get.

Glad you don't rely on an HTML editor, but also glad we don't have to rely on Pico. ;)

[akiy]

For regex manipulation, I usually use sed. And, yes, all of the HTML editing that I do is on the AikiWeb server (which runs FreeBSD)...

-- Jun

[DanielR]

For regex manipulation, I usually use sed...
Hi Jun,

I find this script (http://www.geocities.com/drozenbaum/fregex.pl) to be particularly useful if you need to apply a regex to a bunch of files. Another reason is that I'm used to the Perl flavor of regex'es, so if you're a long-time sed user, it might be less comfortable.

[akiy]

Thanks, Daniel. I've been using perl for a while now, too (since around or before version 4.036). The first AikiWeb Dojo Search Engine was written in perl. Although the bulk of the website is now written in PHP, many of the ancillary scripts I use for logfile processing and systems administration I've written in perl...

(Although I will say that there's a heck of a lot one can do in dealing with a bunch of files using `find` coupled with sed/grep/awk with the -exec option or `xargs`...)

-- Jun

[DanielR]

...there's a heck of a lot one can do in dealing with a bunch of files using `find` coupled with sed/grep/awk with the -exec option or `xargs`...
Amen to that! I guess it's more of a religious thing :)

[akiy]

Heh -- nah, I think it's more like having enough tools around to do what you need at the time. As I said, I fire up vi when I need to do just a few small edits, use emacs when I want more "power" (like syntax highlighting (which I know that vim has) and keyboard macros), sed/grep/awk/find/xargs when I just need to do some quick regex manipulations, and perl when I have more complex things I need to do. Better to not view everything as nails, I say.

I guess I also just "grew up" working closely with folks who were well-versed in Unix in such open source projects like FreeBSD and Slackware Linux. Not to name drop, but it was amazing watching folks like Jordan Hubbard and Patrick Volkerding do their stuff just using the plain vanilla Unix tools. Now, those were the fun, old days...

-- Jun

[DanielR]

(bowing deeply) A very respectable crowd to mingle in.

I witnessed the "religious thing" I mentioned when I visited the USENIX (LISA'02) conference in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago. At a Perl tutorial there were some hard-core sysadmins that kept asking the question "why would you go through the trouble of writing a Perl script when you could easily do the same thing with (a long UNIX command line with lots of pipes in it follows)". Some habits are hard to break...

[one4k4]

I'm glad to hear you like the FreeBSD. That's what I run my <a href="http://www.poorheart.com">site</a> on too. I'm using php for the site, but everything else I write is usually in Perl. That's pretty much what I write all day at work anyway. mod_perl, really. I'm versed in the Perl flavor of regexs, but the other variants dont have much of a learning curve.

[one4k4]

Blah, quick reply and links don't like each other. Oh well.

[akiy]

I'm just used to FreeBSd since I've run it since version 1.1.5 (or thereabouts) on a then "state of the art" 486/66. Since the company I used to work for used FreeBSD very extensively (including its very famous FTP site, ftp.cdrom.com), it's been the operating system of choice for me...

-- Jun