Subject: Re: Using vi with pine

From: Solstice <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 May 1997 03:06:18 -0400 (EDT)

On Wed, 30 Apr 1997, skywalker wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 29 Apr 1997, James Snow wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> > I've discovered that I kind of prefer vi to pico, and I was ecstatic over
> > the enable-alternate-editor-implicitly option, but my joy was short lived. 
> Are you crazy,....how on earth could you prefer that primate editor "VI"
> to the useful, helpful, normal interface if pico.

That's because VI is a very powerful TEXT editor and can do a lot more
than PICO.  VI can search and replace all instances in a text.  VI can
import unix shell output (e.g. :r !ls -FL) text onto its message body.
EMACS is comparable to VI.

"THE FATE OF BILLIONS ALL DEPEND ON YOU... HEH HEH HEH ... SORRY." - RAYDEN
John "Highway" Tze-Chang Wu            Alpha Phi Omega Nat'l Svc Fraternity
[email-masked]                         http://www.vni.net/apo (Epsilon Mu)
http://www.vni.net/~highway             Central Perk Coffee House (Friends)
(World Wide Web Developer)              http://www.vni.net/~highway/Friends
=================[Chapter Treasurer - Fall 1996/Spring 1997]===============

---

From: Christopher Hicks <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 06:39:34 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 1 May 1997, Solstice wrote:
> > > I've discovered that I kind of prefer vi to pico, and I was ecstatic
> > > over the enable-alternate-editor-implicitly option, but my joy was
> > > short lived. 

Some people prefer power over ease-of-use.  I use both pico or vi
depending on the circumstance.

> import unix shell output (e.g. :r !ls -FL) text onto its message body.

So far, so good.

> EMACS is comparable to VI.

Bzzzt...wrong.  Thank you for playing.  pico is the pencil.  vi is a
drafting set.  emacs is an engineering firm and artists colony rolled into
one.

vi and emacs are only comparable in the sense that comparisons can be made
between them.  But you can make comparisons between virtually any two
editors, so that's not what you meant.  You meant that they have similar
functionality.  That is way, way, way off.

</chris>

Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to buy Microsoft products.

---

From: Solstice <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 11:46:04 -0400 (EDT)

> drafting set.  emacs is an engineering firm and artists colony rolled into

My mistake.  The extent of use I've seen with EMACS was simply used as a
text editor for programming.  I stand corrected. :)

---

From: Robin S Socha <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 15:30:08 +0200 (CEST)

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  >drafting set. emacs is an engineering firm and artists colony rolled into

Well, now, since you seem to be in the mood for yet another boring holy war,
let's lay out sensible rules first:

1. There is no such thing as vi.
2. There is no such thing as emacs.

How's that?

Well, there's vi, vim, viper, elvis... And there's emacs, XEmacs, jemacs,
microemacs, jove...

  >vi and emacs are only comparable in the sense that comparisons can be
  >made between them. But you can make comparisons between virtually any two

As for the value of comparisons in general: IMAO, you can compare anything,
but most of these comparisons aren't very fruitful (being a political
scientist, I may draw your attention to the heated debates that arose over
the theory of totalitarianism vs. theories of fascism...).
Therefore, while you may well compare, say, vi to jove, comparing vi to
XEmacs certainly doesn't make much sense.

Yet, since almost anyone these days owns a computer that launches even emacs
within 1--2 seconds, the comparison might yet be sensible because emacs has
some very sensible features which pine in general and even with pico as its
alternate editor lacks. Compare pine to gnus and you'll find that is is
inferior in almost any respect. But then again, who needs all those
features?

Therefore, I'd suggest burying this thread, if I may, because it's been all
over the net for years, and there doesn't seem to be a solution.

Later,
Robin

  >> > > I've discovered that I kind of prefer vi to pico, and I was
  >> > > ecstatic over the enable-alternate-editor-implicitly option, but my
  >> > > joy was short lived.
  >> > Are you crazy,....how on earth could you prefer that primate editor
  >> > "VI" to the useful, helpful, normal interface if pico.

- -- 
Robin S. Socha, Political Science Dept., Bonn University, Bonn
To get my pgp public key, send an e-mail with the subject "get pgp key"
GMC d++ s+:+ a- C++ UL++$>+++$ P+>++$ E>+ W- N+ o@ w--- M-- PS--- PE+++ Y+
PGP++>+++ t+() 5-- tv++(+) b+++ DI++ D+(++) G++>+++ e++>+++ h r++>+++ y+**

---

From: Christopher Hicks <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 14:47:37 -0400 (EDT)

On Fri, 2 May 1997, Robin S Socha wrote:
> Well, now, since you seem to be in the mood for yet another boring holy
> war, let's lay out sensible rules first:

Lacking a true net.kook to take up a contrary side, I'll do what I can. 

> 2. There is no such thing as emacs.

I agree mostly.  In each case there is "one true" one and many variants.
(And I'm not saying that the variant is in someway lacking since I use
variants in each case.)  But referring to "something that descended from
and/or remains somewahat similar to vi" simply as "vi" seems to be an
appropriate and wise expedient.

> Yet, since almost anyone these days owns a computer that launches even
> emacs within 1--2 seconds, the comparison might yet be sensible because
> emacs has some very sensible features which pine in general and even
> with pico as its alternate editor lacks. Compare pine to gnus and you'll
> find that is is inferior in almost any respect. But then again, who
> needs all those features? 

I need those features.  Something that was smarter about justification of
quoted blocks would save me ten minutes per week.  Having an addressbook
that has better functionality built in would save me more time than that.
The beauty of pine is that these features can be added, but off-by-default
for those users that don't want them.  To be honest, I'd like to see us
embed perl (or some lisp) in pine with lots of hooks that would allow
functions to be called for certain events.  This would make having a
personal signature generator easier.  In fact, building a pine-compatible
email program in perl might be a good thing.  Pine provides a very good
user interface and is very stable, but "culturally" it encourages
minimalism while supporting a number of "expert" features.  Hmmmm....
perl needs some more free "applications".  :-)

> Therefore, I'd suggest burying this thread, if I may, because it's been
> all over the net for years, and there doesn't seem to be a solution. 

As it relates to the future of pine I don't intend to "bury" it.  As it
relates to editor religion, I have no intention of continuing given that
my original point about the incomparability of emacs and vi has been
thoroughly made.

</chris>

---

From: Robin S Socha <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 23:49:12 +0200 (CEST)

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  >On Fri, 2 May 1997, Robin S Socha wrote:

[...]

[features in mailers]
  >quoted blocks would save me ten minutes per week.  

"supercite"?

  >Having an addressbook that has better functionality built in would save
  >me more time than that. 

"BBDB"?
  
  >The beauty of pine is that these features can be added, but
  >off-by-default for those users that don't want them. 
  
...thereby making pine even bigger than it already is?  
  
  >To be honest, I'd like to see us embed perl (or some lisp) in pine with
  >lots of hooks that would allow functions to be called for certain events.
  
Can you say "(add-hook 'mail-yank-hooks 'sc-cite-original)" in elisp?
  
  >This would make having a personal signature generator easier. 

"Random flames"?
  
  >In fact, building a pine-compatible email program in perl might be a good
  >thing. Pine provides a very good user interface and is very stable, but
  >"culturally" it encourages minimalism while supporting a number of
  >"expert" features. 
  
What's wrong with that? Personally, I found "growing up" with pine quite
refreshing. I found that it doesn't cover all of my needs anymore, so I
might move to Gnus in the end, but I like the idea of having a program that
is foolproof in vanilla-mode but quite powerful when modified.
  
  >Hmmmm.... perl needs some more free "applications".

"Perl users are sick, twisted programmers who are just showing off."
                
  >my original point about the incomparability of emacs and vi has been

Let's put it this way: If it wasn't for its poor yanking, pico would cover
99% of everybody's needs as an editor in pine. 

And there's this, too:

	109448 Dec 20  1995 /usr/bin/pico*
	172716 Aug 10  1995 /usr/bin/joe* (or jpico...)
	315772 Oct 22  1996 /usr/bin/vim*
       2804464 Aug 28  1996 /usr/X11R6/bin/xemacs* :-)

vim is a monster and big, too. It's a powerful tool, but its a typical
example of user-unfriendliness IMAO. :-) Let's use joe instead... >:->

Cheers,
Robin

- -- 
Robin S. Socha, Political Science Dept., Bonn University, Bonn
To get my pgp public key, send an e-mail with the subject "get pgp key"
GMC d++ s+:+ a- C++ UL++$>+++$ P++>+++$ E>+ W- N+ o@ w--- M-- PS--- PE+++ Y+
PGP++>+++ t+() 5-- tv++(+) b+++ DI++ D+(++) G++>+++ e++>+++ h r++>+++ y+**

---

From: Christopher Hicks <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 21:03:01 -0400 (EDT)

>   >quoted blocks would save me ten minutes per week.

Do we have patches to make it work in pine?

>   >Having an addressbook that has better functionality built in would save

I'm not familiar with that acronym, would you explain it?

> ...thereby making pine even bigger than it already is?

Bigger isn't bad if done properly.

> Can you say "(add-hook 'mail-yank-hooks 'sc-cite-original)" in elisp?

Yes I can.  Bud I'd rather say it in perl so it wouldn't sound so overly
parenthetical.

>   >This would make having a personal signature generator easier.

Flickers.

> is foolproof in vanilla-mode but quite powerful when modified.

It is quite powerful, but it lacks the flexibility and easy modifiability
of something like gnus or a perl-based MUA.

> "Perl users are sick, twisted programmers who are just showing off."

But showing off is so fun and can be quite useful.

    "What is the sound of Perl?  Is it not the sound of a wall that
     people have stopped banging their heads against?"
                --Larry Wall in <[email-masked]>

"Waving away a cloud of smoke, I look up, and am blinded by a bright,
white light. It's God. No, not Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds, but
God. In a booming voice, He says: "THIS IS A SIGN. USE LINUX, THE FREE
UNIX SYSTEM FOR THE 386."  (Matt Welsh) 

> 99% of everybody's needs as an editor in pine.

The other 1% are those of who are supporting the other 99%.  The 1% are
the ones who have to install this stuff.  If you can make the 1% happier
and not annoyt the 99% much then you'll have a more popular product.

> example of user-unfriendliness IMAO. :-) Let's use joe instead... >:->

And the perl binary itself is probably on the same size as emacs.  That's
life.  Big doesn't have to be unfriendly.

</chris>

---

From: [email-masked] (Scott Norwood)
Date: 2 May 1997 01:09:47 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>EMACS is comparable to VI.

Definately, agreed!  Once you're used to vi, you'll never go back
to pico.  Pico is great for non-UNIX-geeks, but is extraordinarily
primative in terms of its capabilities.  Ever try to do something
moderately complicated, say, take a UNIX /etc/passwd file, and strip
out everything but the list of usernames (i.e. delete everything after
the first ':' in each line) in pico?  You'd have to go through each
line individually...with vi (or sed), it's one simple regular expression,
that's maybe ten or fewer characters long.

-- 
Scott Norwood:  [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
Lame Home Page #1:  http://balloon.ml.org/          <-- School year only
Lame Home Page #2:  http://www.nyx.net/~snorwood/   <-- Regular page
Lame Quote:  Penguins?  In Snack Canyon?

---

From: Matt Simmons <[email-masked]>
Date: 03 May 1997 13:11:45 -0500

> >EMACS is comparable to VI.
Much in the way that a Jaguar XK8 is comparable to a Gremlin - they're
both cars.

> primative in terms of its capabilities.  Ever try to do something
I disagree.  When I'm writing e-mail, I want all of the word
processing frills, like word wrap, easy navigation (w/o having to
switch modes), etc.  For that, I used Pico.

When I need an editor for quick-and-dirty shell-script editing, or
something similar, I use vi.  Vi is better IMHO for editing when
appearance doesn't count.

When I'm doing real coding, I use XEmacs.

It's all a matter of using the right tool for the right job...

---

From: Matt Simmons <[email-masked]>
Date: 03 May 1997 13:21:03 -0500

>        2804464 Aug 28  1996 /usr/X11R6/bin/xemacs* :-)

On what planet?

[simmonmt@phoenix]:1:14pm:~> ls -l /p/pine-3.95/../*/pine
... 2035712 Aug  7  1996 /p/pine-3.95/../hp9k7-hpux9/pine*
... 1585620 Jan 20 16:37 /p/pine-3.95/../i86pc-sos5/pine*
... 2484800 Aug  1  1996 /p/pine-3.95/../mips-irix5/pine*
... 2484800 Aug  1  1996 /p/pine-3.95/../mips-irix6/pine*
... 2039808 Aug  1  1996 /p/pine-3.95/../sun4-sos4/pine*
... 2456708 Aug  1  1996 /p/pine-3.95/../sun4-sos5/pine*

(yes, they're all stripped)

[simmonmt@phoenix]:1:18pm:/p/p20/xemacs-19.15> ls -l */xemacs
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root     4861952 Apr  3 13:26 hp9k7-hpux9/xemacs*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root     3172384 Apr  2 16:30 i86pc-sos5/xemacs*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     staff    5584088 Mar 27 19:57 mips-irix5/xemacs*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root     3953712 Apr  3 15:13 mips-irix6/xemacs*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root     4292608 Mar 27 18:41 sun4-sos4/xemacs*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     staff    3358164 Mar 27 21:55 sun4-sos5/xemacs*

Given the extra functionality you get with xemacs (ignoring the 16M
lisp directory), I'd say they were pretty well matched.

---

From: Matt Simmons <[email-masked]>
Date: 03 May 1997 13:27:08 -0500

> >   >I need those features.  Something that was smarter about
> >   >justification of quoted blocked would save me ten minutes per week.
> > "supercite"?
Just as soon as you rewrite it in lisp. =)

> I'm not familiar with that acronym, would you explain it?
BBDB stands for the Insidious Big Brother Database, a wonderful
package that functions as sort of a rolodex on steroids.  It has all
of the functionality of the Pine addressbook, but it also supports
user-defined fields, it can automagically build database entries by
scanning your mail messages, and it can (with Gnus, don't know about
other mailers), tag messages from people for whom you have BBDB entries.

> Bigger isn't bad if done properly.
Which is why I do so love the lisp subdirectory (or site-lisp) found
in *Emacs installations.

---

From: Robin S Socha <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 May 1997 21:48:48 +0200 (CEST)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

  >Robin S Socha <[email-masked]> writes:

[snipped some giant ls -al soapbox, just to be back with a vengeance]

Ok, here's what I got...:

15785 root       1   0  2464 2464  1656 T       0  0.0  7.9   0:00 xemacs
15738 root       0   0  2092 2012   908 S       0  0.0  6.4   0:01 pine
15789 root       6   0   716  716   524 S       0  0.0  2.3   0:00 vi
15783 root       1   0   628  628   336 S       0  0.0  2.0   0:00 joe
  
  >lisp directory), I'd say they were pretty well matched.

I fully agree. XEmacs rules, Gnus's better than pine. Objections anyone?
But can you use Gnus on your CLI without refcard? Would you give it to an
inexperienced user? =8-} Would you moderate the mailing list for it?

However, I still cannot quite see where this thread is leading to. While in
general, I share your views on expandability and customization, I think that
you're aiming at the wrong target. IMAO, a user that needs the features
you're asking for doesn't need pine anymore, but is better off using Gnus
instead, anyway. 

I mean, the spirit of u*ix (correct me if I'm wrong again) is to combine
several tools to achieve various goals: in this sense, I don't see XEmacs as
an editor, but rather as an environment for basically everything I need for
my work (programming, email, news, www, making coffee [does anyone remember
the name of that .el which lets you hook up electric gadgets?). 

You seem to be thinking along the same lines, so your suggestions might miss
the target, because pine is a specialised tool. Its purpose is emails and
news, not a full-fledged database (BBDB), filtering (procmail), fancy
yanking (supercite), or even encryption (those filter-scripts are nice, but
mailcrypt is ultimately better).

All _I_ want is better yanking in pico, and maybe pgp within pine (which
cannot be done for reasons of US legislation). If you could come up with a
Deluxe version of pine that turns into a pizza with a large Coke at
midnight, everybody would love you.

So here we are, deploring the world's injustice, dreaming of a better world
in which Alphas come at $500 and everyone has a 300MB Ramdisk... *sigh* I
guess it's one of those lonely Saturday evenings... >:->

Have a nice weekend,
Robin

- -- 

         Free Software: Contribute nothing, expect nothing

---

From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 8 May 1997 13:13:53 GMT

>... 2456708 Aug  1  1996 /p/pine-3.95/../sun4-sos5/pine*

What's your point concerning pine?  That is not an editor.

 >(yes, they're all stripped)

Are they all dynamically linked?  (still beside the point)

 >-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     staff    3358164 Mar 27 21:55 sun4-sos5/xemacs*

So you are comparing an MUA to an editor that includes a complete
implementation of lisp.  What does that have to do with the size of joe or
pico or vi?  On my SPARC running Solaris 2.5.1, here are the sizes of some
editors:

-r-xr-xr-x   5 bin      bin       236328 May  3  1996 /bin/vi
-rwxr-xr-x   5 root     faculty   221008 Jul 11  1995 joe2.8
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     faculty   676312 Jul  6  1995 jove
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     other     176536 Jul  6  1995 pico

vi and joe are stripped, while jove and pico are not.

 >lisp directory), I'd say they were pretty well matched.

Neither joe nor jove requires any external resources.

--
  R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)810-762-9765   ___________________
  Humanities & Social Science,  GMI Eng.& Mgmt.Inst. ()  /   _____  ______
  Flint, MI 48504    Free speech and free software!  /\ /        / /  /  / /
  Web admin:  http://www.gmi.edu/      [email-masked]   /________/ /  /  / /