Linux - thumbs down

[Andy Burns]

Nowadays, it (ESXi) is Linux with a hypervisor slid underneath it, most of the bits of Linux they don't require chopped off and management daemons running on top.

[Andy Burns]

On VMS, EDIT/TPU was my favourite, and before that on DOS P-Edit which was a text editor based on WordPerfect

[Tim Streater]

If Ed is your secretary then I think I prefer Vi.

[cl]

There is no alternative to the Epson V700, except possibly a dedicated Nikon slide scanner.

For most things though I'd agree, I always choose printers which have Linux support for example.

[cl]

There are excellent GUI implementations of vi, the most ubiquitous is probably gvim, personally I use xvile. It means I can use my vi fingers for *everything*.

[cl]

But then you lose the ability to copy and paste between operating systems and the ability to instantly switch between an application on one to an application on the other.

[Huge]

All editors suck. The only thing that varies is the degree and scope of the suckage. All of them have irritating deficiencies of one kind or another, and I have never come across one that doesn't have some kind of suckage. Gedit, which I'm using right now doesn't handle non-printing characters well (and sometimes refuses to edit files containing them at all). vi has a "user interface" very similar to an Iron Maiden (the instrument of torture, not the band, although you could argue they are similar). vim has an incredibly irritating habit of "O"pening a new line with a comment character if the current line starts with a comment. I can't recall why I hate nano, but I'm not using it, so I must hate it for some reason.

Mind you, I've never learned Emacs, and I don't intend to. I regard learning a new editor with the same joy as abdominal surgery.

[Clive George]

ESX probably, but I think ESXi is built from scratch - it's not much more than the hypervisor and takes

[Tim Streater]

The whole point about wysiwyg editors is that there isn't anything to learn - assuming you know the basics that apply to any GUI such as copy/paste. The app has menus and if you forget how to do something just browse the menus until you find the command you need.

As opposed to e.g. vi or TECO, where if you forget a command then you're f***ed.

Simples.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Assuming you HAVE a GUI that is.

Most of my vi work was well before even Windows, let alone X windows was available.

na esc U gets you there.

[Tim Streater]

Thass why its GUI or vi (actually vim on da Mac).

[Tim Streater]

Exactly - f***ed. Ya think I'm gonna remember that? Even with vi I refer to my Ultrix cheat card all the time.

[Vir Campestris]

I really must find something better than vi. On one of the boxes that has SMB I edit using Visual Studio over the net...

And I'm glad someone mentioned Teco.

?TECUEY

[Bob Eager]

+1

And it popped up again, in a modified form, in the assembler ROM for the BBC micro.

[Tim Streater]

And what really burnt my arse, in about 1980, was that editing had, with Wylbur and the like, finally got to a point where you could edit stuff on line and you could more or less guess what command was needed. Want to move some lines of text to elsewhere? Try:

move 27/44 to 8.01

which would move the lines numbered from 27 to 44, from where they were to just after line 8. And the moved lines would get numbered 8.01, 8.02 etc.

But we had summer students at CERN, by 1980 starting to be CompSci graduates rather than physics grads like me, and the buggers felt that TECO was better because you could do the above move command by typing fewer characters. What a waste of brain cells.

[Bob Eager]

But you could solve differential equations in TECO.

Apparently.

[Johny B Good]

That was a good question but it looks like Rob just lit the blue touchpaper and retired from this discussion.

[Thomas Prufer]

I was looking at similar issue: I'd like to run Forte Agent under Windows. (Yeah: there are many program with similar news/email functionality under Linux, but I've gotten used to the keypresses etc. and want to keep it.)

Apparently, Agent (older version) will run happily under "Crossover" by codeweavers, which costs 48 Euros, and is a WINE-based thing.

I went and looked at the editor you mentioned. Crossover site says it'll run WYSIWYG Web builder 5, 6, 7 in "Gold" compatibility status, and 8 in "Silver", and no mention either way of 9. They have a free trial download. They also have links to their competitors, with a note saying to try them if their product doesn't suit, which is unusual.

48 ? may be acceptable if it saves time in something you do for customers...?

Thomas Prufer

[Adrian Brentnall]

Thanks for the suggestion - but I already tried the free trial of crossover - and it didn't work! Even asked their tech support people - who sent back a 'boilerplate' reply, that ended up with

"If after that your application still won't run then Crossover is missing whatever programming your app needs to run and you'll need to use a full emulator instead. Some full emulators include Parallels, VMware, Virtual Box, or Boot Camp/dual booting."

Seems that the crossover folks rely on users to rate how particular Win programs run under Crossover - and more or less shrug when they're not actually supported....

Wasn't impressed, didn't buy the full version! Adrian

[mick]

According to the WineHQ site Forte Agent versions 6.0 and 7.2 seem to install and run ok under wine, with the exception of SSL connections. No other virtualisation is needed.