Fedora 12: Emacs is not for software development

[Yaakov Nemoy]

2009/11/28 Orcan Ogetbil <oget.fedora at gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 11:19 PM, Braden McDaniel wrote:
>>
>> I'm an emacs user who's nearly completely useless in vi.  But, really...
>> it just doesn't matter if emacs isn't installed by default.  If you want
>> it, you know how to get it.  And let's be frank: emacs is not something
>> that a user who is unaware of it might stumble into and suddenly find
>> himself blindingly productive. (Nor, for that matter, is vi.)
>>
>
> I agree. My problem is not that emacs is missing in development stack.
> My problem is when there is something wrong with the computer and I
> have to boot in the rescue mode, I can't rescue anything because emacs
> is not there. I wrote on a piece of paper how I would save and exit in
> vi, or exit without saving in vi, but that paper is gone now. I wish
> vi had some tutorial the way emacs does, so one don't get lost in it.
>
> The other day at work, I had to tweak some stuff in one of our
> servers, but I found that another person at work removed emacs from
> the machine because "it takes too much space". There I realized that
> Emacs has always been the scapegoat.
>
> When did Fedora stop installing emacs by default? Fedora Core 3?

As a sysadmin, this is completely the wrong mentality.

Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS do not ship with emacs out of the box. If you have to rescue a system, you need to know how to use the tools present. You do not question this, because no matter how much control over your own environment, you never know when someone is offering you a big wad of cash to fix their network.

The same applies to your own network. You need to document which editors should be present on which machines and who has the skills to use any particular editor.

Finally, if you want to call yourself a sysadmin, it's not good enough to be comfortable in your preferred editor, but to know the ins and outs of the entire system. You must know how to use emacs *and* vi. You must know how to use find and grep. You should know how to use awk and xargs. There's ways of doing the same in emacs and vi, but you neve know when you might come across a system with corrupt binaries.

But this has less to do with what should be shipped as a default editor for programmers.

-Yaakov
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