Re: [vox] Arkeia Power Award

[Mister Resistor <tuMAPSmati@uiuc.edu>]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, John McDonnell wrote:

> On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, William Kendrick wrote:
>
> > (vi!  emacs!  vi!  emacs!  vi!  (pico?)  boooooo!)
>
> hey! I resemble that comment!
> Self confessed picolomaniac and proud of it!

<stands up>
Hi, my name is Mr. Resistor.  I was a pico abuser for about 3 years.  I
tried to quit, but I couldn't.  The other editors seemed so hard, and I
didn't know if I had the will power to quit.  But now, I'm better.  I've
been clean for a few years.

I, too, was once misdirected like you.  I wrote and wrote many lines of
code in pico.  One window after another, I would create new pico sessions.
Pico, dainty and fragile, was not aware of other sessions going on.  So,
when I opened the same file in multiple pico sessions, made changes, the
other pico sessions were not aware of the changes.  As such, when I was
quitting, I did not save and commit the changes to disk in the right
order, and my code changes never took place and the code remained broken.
Those were the dark days - when I didn't know about CVS, and didn't know about
proper source code maintenance.

Then, I tried vi. It made me cry.  Then along came Emacs, and it was like
heaven.  So customizable, and so easy to use.  Even better when you're on
a system where you don't have access to 'screen' ...

So, for everything you do - learn to use CVS and learn to use Emacs.  It's
like cocaine for the coder.  You will thank me for it.

-- 
Pavan xxxxxx (xxxxxx@uiuc.edu)   http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~xxxxxx
Computer Engineering Student     University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign