Long long time ago in a galaxy far far away a great war begun. Or maybe not so long ago, around mid-70s, when both sides arised on soil of Unix development. Vi and Emacs are text editors for Unix-like systems, widely used by developers, administrators etc. Many users that got used to one of the editors was claiming that this one is the best, which caused many discussions and even flame wars all around internet. This how the Editor war begun and was waged over many years. Today I’d rather think about it as a good joke, I don’t mind when sometimes my collegues still call me ‘vi worshipper’ .

Qemacs on N900

Nowdays both editors have many clones, on N900 we have Vim (a.k.a. Vi Improved available in extras) and Qemacs (available in extras-devel and extras-testing). I won’t tell you which one is better and some of you may not be sure why do anyone need such low-level text editor, when having Notes, Maepad and other applications for N900. I use it to edit files that are not in MyDocs catalogue on my N900, when I’d like to test some advanced features myself, because mostly I know what I’m doing. If you would like to do such low-level changes, you might need such editor.

Vim on N900

But why I even mention Editor war? Well, first of all to make some of you aware of open source history. Second of all, because i’d like to go back to Maepad once again and side with Vi fans . When I’ve mentioned it once in post regarding Maemo internals and software packages I haven’t stated why should you update this application. Vim fans will find useful keybindings introduced in Maepad 1.3. You can see it yourself on youtube in Vim Keybindings Demo. Enjoy!

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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial

Please visit Nokia N900 Forum