The great advantage of ‘vi’ is that it doesn’t need the mouse or menu options or F1..12 keys. So if you can type blindly you can edit files much more quickly than the ‘common people’.

The big advantage of ‘vi’ is that it has two modes, namely a non-text-inserting/changing mode and a text-inserting/changing mode. Programmers spend a lot of time not actually writing or changing text but traversing it or modifying it in a not-line-after-line
mode and ‘vi’ is perfect for that.

For example, go to the start of a line and use the insert command ‘;’ to insert text and insert ‘ ‘ to move the first line of a block a level to the right and use ESC to leave the insert mode. Now go down to the next line using the ‘j’ or the down arrow key and type ‘.’ to repeat the last command. I have never found a mouse-based editor that can change say 10 lines faster and ‘vi’ still has another technique: mark the current line using ‘mk’ and go to the end line and type “:’k,.s/^/ /” and all lines from the first line to the current line will have two spaces inserted at their beginning. This might take you 10 minutes using a mouse-based editor.

The command may seem very cryptical but it means:
: – go into line editing mode
‘k – from the line marked ‘k’
, – seperator
. – to the current line
s – substitute
/ – seperator
^ – substitute the start of the line
/ – seperator
– substitute by two spaces
/ – seperator
– end the line editing mode

Of course all of these things can be varied in all kinds of regular expression like ways…

Another advantage is that ‘vi’ hasn’t changed much since it’s inception so all of the old manuals still apply. It has very excellent code coloring since several years for all kinds of languages and you can move the cursor using the arrow keys which allows you to stay in the edit-mode if you like.

By the way, Eric says that white text on a black background is better than black on white but the reason that original monitors had that was because it required much less power. Just as black on white paper printing needs much less ink. I don’t mind white text on a black background on a screen, but not within a (windows) frame that is based on a light-colored background. I’d like to know what ‘pure fact’ would back up Eric’s theory.

It does fun things with text, such as “commit word wrap”, “unwrap lines”, “tabified”, “untabified”, etc. It can instantly convert any file to or from DOS format, Unix format, or a couple of different Unicode formats.

http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/
or
http://www.welcome.to/metapad/