Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Tim Streater wrote:

From time to time I get dopey enough to think that I ought to learn
the ins and outs of unix - environment variables, shell scripting,
edlin, emacs, etc etc.

I don't use any of those.

Well neither do I.

script is for monkeys who cant write C :-)

I can't be arsed to write C any longer, so I do it all in PHP, including
CLI scripts.

Every time I try a regexp it blows up on me and I write some C code
that does EXACTLY what I want, not what some **** decided would be
useful for me to do.

regexps are line noise, by and large. As are TECO commands.

I program with a PROPER editor (Geany) in C and PHP.

TextWrangler under OS X.

Or write docs in Open Office.

After five minutes (or twenty [1] if I had been fool enough to start
emacs), I feel like throwing the computer out of the window. Then
I'm sane again until the next time. Luckily these episodes are
becoming rarer as I get older.
[1] actually it's five minutes in all cases, it's just that it
takes an extra fifteen minutes to figure out how to quit emacs.

well exactly.

The beauty of - say - a modern Gnome GUI is it behaves pretty much
like windows XXP except its faster and never crashes. Geekls may sniff
at that, bit I find it makes things easier.

Click on an editor icon, there's an editor. Nuff said.

I admit to occasionally using vi to edit root level files, but thats
cos I HAD to learn it as the ONLY editor that was ALWAYS present on
ANY *nix system.

Yep yep, I still have (actually two, for some reason) an Ultrix cheat
card for vi. But even vi has a 127-page manual that you can pay dosh
for. I've never understood why an editor should need a manual.

And I avoid editing root level files except as a last resort.

The fact is you can install linux and get networking browsing email
office (word/calc/powerpoint) plus a media player that will play DVDS
all as a standard issue distro without ever having to edit anything at
all.

And if that is your basic toolkit, there's no need top step outside
the GUI.

OS X in my case. You can also install Xcode, which I found to be a handy
way of just clicking to get the occasional C program I want to alter, to
compile/build. Such as the sqlite shell, or vasm and vlink (for
cross-assembling 68000 code). That way, I can completely ignore the
existence of 'make'.

yeah. I frigged with OSX but frankly I didn't like it.
Cant afford a decent mac..and its enough keeping my wifes G5 going
through the inevitable crashes

I thin the final nail in that coffin was when a friend brought his late
sons I phone over 'to get some pictures off'

The mac didn't recognise it. G5 wont run latest code... Linux did tho.

And yet the hardware is of comparable age.



--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.