Degrees's Journal: Just a few changes in life.

FWIW, I'll list a few changes in my life, and one thing I figured out about myself and Linux.

First, changes: My youngest son (step-son, really) moved out yesterday, but only for a little while. He going to work in a summer camp as a dishwasher - he will get one day a week off. The camp is an hour and a quarter away, but he doesn't have a car - so my wife and I will be his transport fro and to. I can already tell my wife is going to suffer a bit of the 'empty nest' syndrome. I pray my son remembers to use the phone card we gave him to call his mother. It can be easy to forget your mom while you are making all sorts of new friends.

Second change: I have been reassigned to work evening shift, 3:30 PM to midnight. Someone had to do it, and I got stuck. Supposedly, it is only temporary.

Third change: I got a new boss three weeks ago. My old boss was a great technician, but he has the pit viper that worships Catbert as his boss, if you get my drift. So the pit viper brings in an outsider. This guy seems pretty good so far - I hope he works out. I hope it takes longer than normal for the pit viper to stab this guy in the back. Not being very charitable, am I?

I got my ass severely chewed last week by the pit viper. I would not have minded if my failure to act quick enough had been brought up as a 'how do we improve?' topic - but instead it was brought up as a 'this is unacceptable! if you don't change, we will have do something else. (the implication being he will fire me.)' Although I tried to argue that when you are juggling three tasks, one of them will be last - it ultimately doesn't matter. Nothing is impossible for the man that does not have to do it himself. Ultimately, I asked for a transfer (and demotion) out of the unit to get away from the guy, but it looks like they are hoping I forget my request. So then I prayed for guidance. Care to guess what the answer was?

Of course, it was Romans 12:14 - If someone mistreats you, don't curse him, pray that God will bless him.

Yuck. ;-)

But of course, it is right. I am going to have work at that one, though.

Lastly, "What I Hate About Linux": (sub-titled "My mind is weary, oh so weary. Did you have to inflict vi on me?" )

I was talking to one of our younger technicians who was in the the same Cisco 'Fundamentals of Unix and Linux' class, and he hit the nail on the head. I was expressing my frustration at getting things done, and his words were "you just don't like editing files." blammo - there it was. He was right, and I didn't see it. I thought about it, and yes. I have been using various editors since 1979. I am weary of learning new editors. CP/M, MS-DOS, IBM Sys/36, HP 3000, Windows, Novell, Cabletron, Cisco, Word, WordPerfect, WordStar, WinEdit, and more.... And now I am supposed to learn vi (or worse, as I hear it - emacs ?

Sometimes you just don't want someone giving you that express ticket onto the cluetrain. ;-)

Anyway, time to wrap up. I am soliciting suggestions for a Linux character mode editor (not GUI) that acts like the MS-DOS edit program. What is its name, and from where can I download it? I would like it to be open source. Thank you for any time or suggestions you can give me.

Prayer and pico

[chrisleonard]

Hey, that deal with your boss's pet pit viper doesn't sound like fun, but I'm glad you are turning to prayer and the Bible for guidance. I will pray for you this morning (after posting this).

Also, a lot of the vi-phobes on my team (we're the DBA group) use pico to edit files. Pico is part of the pine (email) package from the University of Washington, so if you have pine, you already have pico. It's pretty easy to use, and although it can't do all the nifty programmatic things vi can, I suspect that yo

Re:Prayer and pico

[Degrees]

Thank you for the advice and prayer. I will check out pico and nano. I remember seeing pine as an installed option when I first installed Redhat 6 - but nowadays I have been using Mandrake 9. If the editor is easy enough, I won't mind doing the install... as long as the install doesn't require me to edit a file.... ;-)

You don't like *gasp* vi!?!

[sielwolf]

What is the world coming to? Vi is the second greatest text editor ever written (after vim). How can you not love commands like :d/^M?

Re:You don't like *gasp* vi!?!

[Degrees]

That made me chuckle. Thank you.

joe, jed, mcedit

[NaveWeiss]

Pico may be a quick and dirty solution, but it's a very limited solution. You might want to check joe, or its colorful equivalent jed [mit.edu].

There's an NC/FAR equivalent for unix called mc [ibiblio.org], and it got a nice text editor (mcedit) included.

But I assume the best way will be to learn vi, since every stupid unix box got it, so you'll never have a problem editting files. I got to learn it some day.

Re:joe, jed, mcedit

[Degrees]

I just now looked at jed (per your link) and it looks nice, if a little complicated. Anything the has 'Buffers' on the main menu may be a bit beyond my old brain.

Looking further, mcedit looks very promising. Although I am a little confused - it looks like mcedit is a call to cooledit? As I search for links to cooledit, it looks like it has moved into the GUI arena. Not that that is bad, but my 586 with 32 MB of RAM ins't exactly an optimum platform for X Window programs.

I remember seeing Midnight Com

If you *do* have to learn vi...

[chrisleonard]

...congratulate yourself. As an added bonus, you will also be able to safely ignore all future spam, as knowing vi will truly make you a "real man." :o)

Also, this [uwaterloo.ca] little document might be useful. I'm sure others have their favorite little vi cheat sheets, but somebody has to nominate at least one!