Well, either should have more use than AppleScript.

*shudder*

Exactly, just look at what I became with it being my first "computer language" (before I met Claris HomePage 3 and dug under the hood to find HTML, and subsequently CSS and JavaScript... before I even had an internet connection and relied completely on magazines... and later PHP after deciding that CGI through Perl was too difficult).

Umm, why would you do that? Sed will do that for you quickly and easily. Or you could just use tr to translate the carriage returns into carriage return plus line feed.

I assume that I'm missing something there. I've had to deal with this problem from time to time going between MS and *NIX text formats.

IMHO no editor will ever surpass vi for programming. Plus you can get vim to do pretty much everything that a basic IDE will do for you.

Vi is one of those things where you hate it at first, but quickly discover that you can't live without it. The learning curve is similar to being pushed out of a plane to learn to skydive, but it's incredibly usable and efficient once you learn it.

i'm guessing it also removed CR's or the IDE he probably loaded it in would have done it for him (VS for example reads *nix formated text fine)

8 years ago you didn't have IDEs in your university... what were those cheap fuckers doing with your tuition then?
Ack, first Perl and now vi? You really know how to push buttons don't you?:)

It's the Blender of text editors!

I like to code my Perl in vi. ;-P

Seriously though, once you get the basics it's hard to justify using anything else. I learned how to use it because it was the only text editor that's guaranteed to be on a *NIX system and at this point I can't stand to use anything else except for extremely simple tasks. Switching between keyboard and mouse, which pretty much every other text editor requires is a serious waste of energy and time.

That being said, I've been known to crack out sed and awk so that I don't even have to open up vi for repetitive tasks.

Seriously, you owe it to yourself to learn to use those power tools they can save you a huge amount of time and effort. Older tools aren't automatically better tools, but sed, awk and vi are ones that anybody who claims to be a power user ought to have familiarity with. I'm still a bit weak with awk and sed, but they still save me a huge amount of time and energy.

And if you're doing it right you'll even have a collection of recipes before long.
Pretty much, but I'm pretty sure that the death count on vi at present is significantly higher. :-P

oh you got them but not till you could hand code the opening of a C program in your sleep :P
After a couple of weeks you were given a copy of VS to install on your comp aswell which helped...

Well, that's the same reason I learned vi, too, but still, that old adage becomes less true every year, especially now that DVD-sized Linux ISOs are the norm. Also, RPM based distros didn't used to have app repos, but now they do.

apt-get install nano is a whole lot easier for people to learn that vi. Though I suppose !wq isn't that hard.

As for IDEs, yeah, IDEs are worth using for anything even remotely complicated.

I'll have to try nano, but quite honestly, once you've discovered the power of vi, it's hard to justify using anything less. Vi itself isn't anywhere near as hard to learn as people keep suggesting. Just keep a post it note of the few basic keys while you're getting them figured out. I think that h, j, k, l, :, a, i, p, x, d, w, q and ! is really enough to get started with. And honestly, most of those correspond to key combinations that people already know. The : and ! do require some explanation, but a, i, p, x, d, w and q do exactly what people would guess they do in most cases. The h, j, k, l can be tricky at first, but it's not any harder than w, a, s, d is and people don't gripe about that. Anything beyond the ones I've listed just makes things more efficient.

Vi is nice in that it rewards people who are willing to spend a bit of time learning how to make full use of it. It does freak people out at first having nothing on screen at all to guide them, but in the long term it really is better.

I was actually a bit bored and decided to make a video of me solving exercise 26 of Learn Python The Hard Way.

I was messing around by having Python installed in an Ubuntu VM and the editor on Windows, using a shared folder between the host and the VM, as well as a git repo.

Yeah, I think I have too much spare time on my hands.

nano is based on pico, I wouldn't develop code with it, just useful for editing config files.

I've found it to be a bit easier setting up new languages on Linux than Windows, but that might be due to my language choices.

That being said, that sounds like the same thing that's motivating me to put together a serial number program from a small amount of sed, awk and bash scripting. Sometimes you just have to use tools in order to get a feel for how they work.
Reminds me of ee. I wouldn't use vanilla vi for developing code either, but you can get extensions to vim that make it work out fairly well. I just hate having to go from keyboard to mouse and back and forth.