In the days of typewriters the qwerty layout was designed to slow down the typing because if you typed too fast the typewriter would get stuck. Later the dvorak layout was developed to reduce errors and increase speed. But since qwerty was still more popular it stuck when computer were later developed. So technically dvorak is superior but qwerty is more widespread.

I'm not sure I could re-train my mind to use Dvorak.

Back to the vi topic.

I used to use PICO (part of the PINE mail client) to edit everything on our Linux server (http://team871.zapto.org/) but once I learned vi I found it just as simple to use as pico or any other text editor. Oh and yes, I use SSH exclusively to admin the server. command line administration is a great skill to have, you can't always physically be seated at your server.

I've also found it quite useful to do quick edits via an FTP program.

Example, I use FlashFXP, I connect to the servers FTP, then change over to the directory where our team website resides and just right click on the HTML doc I want to editand select "edit". FlashFXP opens the file in its own text editor, I make the necesary changes, close the file and FlashFXP prompts to UPLOAD the changed file. no need to SSH and edit separately.

I hope some of this info helps, now I'm back to work on our team site :-)

If anyone else is interested (While we are talking about editting) our team came across a nice little piece of HTML/java that creates a text based countdown clock. Right now it is counting down to kick-off, then it will count down to Robot Ship date.

Re: vi editor
 

vi is an evil program that allows you to edit unix files from the command line. I prefer pico over vi, but more than both I prefer to use BBEdit--the mac version of notepad--and save it to my desktop, and then just copy the file.

For example, the apache configuration file is read only. So I open it, change it, save it to my desktop, then type

sudo cp ~/Desktop/httpd.conf /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

and it's placed over there.

--Petey