But nobody talks about GNU Emacs and vim. They say emacs and vi.

When I log into a server and I want an editor I type vi, not vim. Because vi has worked for twenty years, and I assume it always will work!

(That's actually why I bothered to learn a little bit about vi -- it is always there, on every Unix box, and it always works the same way -- no wacky transposition of Meta keys, etc. On my own machines I use nothing but emacs. ;)

That's exactly why I learned to use vi, too.

Many Unix systems (generally the traditionalists) will include vi (as in the standard non-vim vi). Vim is then an added package that can be installed if you wish. There are also several other vi based/cloned like nvi which some Unix systems include. Vim I guess won in that its whats used for the day to day of text editing.

Vim did not win in that its a large package and users are often forced to use a lighter wieght vi clone to admin directly a on server machine.

ps. how do you write a * followed by text?

If you add a space after the * it will be fine.

Text surrounded by stars will become italic, though.

nvi is the default vi on the bsds.

there's still elvis, which is shipped by default on slackware. And there's vile (http://invisible-island.net/vile/) too, a clone that handles buffers better (imo) than vim.

Yes, viper mode for emacs ;-)

Sadly, viper-mode behaves more like a poor nvi clone than a featureful vim clone.

True. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327555/what-vim-features-...