text editing in ubuntu

[Michael M. Moore]

On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 17:56 -0400, Hal Burgiss wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 03:24:58PM +0200, Odd wrote:
> > 
> > I have to agree with Chris Jones. Stay away from vim or any variant of
> > it. It's exactly the type of editor you're _not_ looking for.
> > Perhaps mped would be a better editor for you.
> 
> I'll strongly agree with Tim, that [g]vim is a great, great tool for many
> things including html editing. The biggest issue is that a default, bare metal
> install of vim has no configuration whatsoever and is awkward as hell for
> people who have not had the pleasure before. Simple things become very
> difficult. I have often wondered why distros don't include a simple, default
> .vimrc that mimics something like gedit just to get people over the first few
> hours of hell.

Debian and Ubuntu do provide a simple /etc/vimrc and /etc/gvimrc, but
many of the settings are commented out by default.  Still, all you have
to do is uncomment those you want ... or copy one or both to ~/.vimrc or
~/.gvimrc and edit them there.

Another alternative for those interested in learning more about vim is
Cream:  http://cream.sourceforge.net/index.html

It provides the familiarity of editors like Notepad, Gedit, etc., with
all the power of vim/gvim underneath.  You can take your time learning
how vim works, and meanwhile have a familiar, easy editor available
while you're doing it.  Personally, I think vimtutor is the way to go --
but I prefer learning-by-doing, even if that means taking some time to
navigate the learning curve.  Others, quite understandably, might find a
pre-configured set-up like Cream more to their liking.  Diff'rent
strokes and all that.

(Still others prefer Emacs -- researchers are still working on plausible
explanations for this mystery, but have yet to succeed.)

:-)

-- 
Michael M.