Re: Updated: vim-6.2-1

[somian at adelphia dot net (Soren Andersen)]

Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 03:15:25PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 02:44:00PM +0200, Michael Schaap wrote:
> > The problem is: what GUI?
> 
> Exactly.
{...}
> Not me ;-)  I have no idea what gvim is actually good for.
> The non-GUI version runs very nicely inside of xterm or rxvt,
> so what?   <-- just a rethorical question

Ah, this gives me an opportunity to say how great it is that Vim is
packaged for Cygwin, thanks Corinna. Believe it or not I ran cygwin all
these years without its native Vim installed until the other day, when I
got around to updating my rather long-neglected (like:5 months) cygwin
installation on Win9x. On impulse I selected "Vim" and boy was I happy
when I could just fire it up for some quick rcfile editing work and so
forth.

Now as to the rhetorical question: "what is GVim actually good for?"
With a tool as fundamentally important to programmer/admins as the text
editor, of course there are reasons to want one thing over another
thing. One thing that is great about GVim is its capability to act as a
"server" which can receive remote commands. This is surprisingly useful
and allows for a lot of creative computing once one begins to explore
it.

Another thing important to some of us is that the display capabilities
of the GUI version (GVim) of course excel far beyond the limitations
imposed by the console. Aside from different languages (human), fonts
and charsets and kbd mappings being possible, there is the superb GVim
syntax-hilighting capabilities which I am always showing off in source
code posted on my website
(http://home.att.net/~perlspinr/browse_site.html). Even if the syntax
hilighting (or degree thereof) seems like mostly a toy to a given
person, to the next one it can be very significant.

All-in-all I think both Vim and GVim have their place. I use Vim (in the
terminal) about 75% of the time now, because much of my work is
currently little systems-admining type of tasks and I can get the needed
edits done quickest that way. For larger jobs where I might be working
on the same file(s) for hours ... days ... (argh) weeks at a time, I much
prefer to be using GVim where the fonts are better and much more
convenience is available.

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