Eric, what you just stated is actually quite important! If we are “home”, we can use what we want, but on the job we have to use whatever is offerred. When we’re in a UNIX or Linux shop it’s going to have vi or vim, guaranteed.
In a Windows shop, that can vary; my last financial services job was in a Windows shop and the project I was testing was heavily using XML, so we used two different professional grade editors that work well in that capacity: Notepad+ and UltraEdit.
Since we’re Linux guys here, make absolutely certain that you know primary vi commands; they are pretty easy. First, know that the main editing commands are hjkl- that’s your right hand moved over to the left by one and they are used like this: when you are editing a previously created document, pressing h moves the cursor one character left, j moves one line down, k moves up one line and l moves one character right. Entering i inserts text immediately before the current location and a appends inserted text to the right. If you are starting a new file with vi, you usually type vi (or vim) and the name of the file, then press a to begin writing text. When you are done, press the Esc key; this puts you back in the default edit mode. If you want to exit, press ZZ to write and exit; if you want to cancel text you can press :q!. There are actually several ways to get around but that’s a quick crash course in the absolute essentials for vi or vim!
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Even back in the late 1980s, early 1990s, the office computer at Nortel was either PC or Mac, and for our London, Ontario R&D department, we were standardized on Mac, which I hated. At the time, I had a Bytec Hyperion at home, purchased in 1983!
At work, I had a terminal emulator for VT220 on Mac, but most often, I would go directly to the restricted-access computer room to work directly on the 12" Console.
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Before I left the General, in the 1982-83 timeframe I was working on a project to offload our mainframe servers and interact with them instead through desktop PCs and department servers.
I got to get an early look at a Macintosh PC. It was promising but the unit we had did not have a significant disk, possibly no HDD at all.
Though I tested a number of PCs at first, ultimately I worked with a half dozen towers running UNIX.
That got me in the door to Digital Equipment a few years later because I joined their Telecommunications Systems Engineering group and learned both VMS and extended my UNIX background.
I ended up with an idea I shared with my manager to create a system for connecting between our VMS system and AT&T’s UNIX systems, because we wanted to get them using our office systems and their environment, at first to send Email back and forth with the hope that some office workers would primarily use our office automation tools.
I ended up expanding my UNIX experience, resulting in assignments as a systems engineer and admin for UNIX systems and later as a UNIX engineering team member for localization and internationalization (L10N and I18N).
That’s when I grew my vi and Emacs experience, though at GM I was already competent with both.
I also wrote a few keypad emulator tools for Emacs that allowed me to gradually get pretty good with Emacs Lisp while creating common editor key bindings with two different VMS editors. This was using the number keypad on DEC terminals to perform things like move by word, page, top and bottom of file, sentence and paragraphs.
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