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Many good comments in this thread. I'll just leave a note of my experience and opinion.

I've used vim since about the year 2000. Before having access to a computer running a Unix, I'd read books about the Unix environment and fell a little in love with ed commands. Their power, yes, but also the immediacy of the user experience. It's just there, all the time, in vi.

Having coded a decent amount of vimscript... Eh. vim is not great (I'll likely never switch to neovim either.) Perhaps the best part about vim is the manual. There are so many features, some of which depend on/affect other features in various ways. I use vim for taking freeform notes, transcribing long form texts mostly - the auto formatting that can hard wrap at textwidth, without any extra command or keypress to trigger the formatting) is a feature I use a lot. The ability to quickly pipe text through Unix filters (mostly `par' in my case) is also great.

All this is easily done in emacs too, but I feel there's more immediacy in vi (and vimscript).

I salivate at the better unicode support in emacs, and the ability to have frames - separate GUI windows of the same emacs process. I would use these all the time. (g)vim likely won't get better in these areas within my lifetime.

Availability on mobile devices: I use an iPhone - it's from work, I have it with me all the time. I do not want to carry along any other device. A recent-enough version of vim is available in the AppStore as iVim. This has become the only note-taking app I can bear to use. It can write to text files on iCloud and access them later from other devices.

On vi clones - I wish Thomas Dickey's editor (vile) had become popular, instead of vim. Proper lexing and parsing for syntax highlighting (instead of regexp soup) - Imagine! I started out on computing with Red Hat Linux, where vim was installed by default - and most documentation, online resources, might have mentioned vim instead of any other clone, leading to vim gaining mindshare.


Good point, actually. At least for me, reveals a blind spot. Out of sight, out of mind.


I understand the cost of switching now. Was Postgres never an option? Do the uptime requirements call for RAC etc.?


Our Banner student information system is tied to Oracle. My applications all go against Banner data. Given the licensing cost for Oracle and our current round of cost-cutting, if Postgres was an option, we'd probably take it.


Several years ago at an .edu I had to deal with an upgrade from our current system to Banner. I truly feel for you. :)


Beautiful name indeed. Happy memories of trying out Solaris 8 x86 on a Celeron with 64MB.


<3


Indeed, now I always associate qanats with Leto Atreides II.


As a Linux sysadmin in Norway... bro means bridge and br reminds me of brctl(8).


Yes, "bro" could mean other things in different contexts. But that's irrelevant. It has unfortunate connotations in an IT context.


Everything has unfortunate connotations in some context. If I wanted I could come up with a number of reasons to feel insulted but that's not my thing.


Being professional means valuing conflict avoidance over issues of zero importance.

The nickname of a tool doesn't matter, so minimizing potential conflicts makes sense.


Totally agree and agree with renaming. Would wish certain other groups could agree with your ideas as well.

"Those who have reason will have to use it..."


I agree. The intentionally prevocational logo (a Menorah) has put me off CLISP[0], I would guess many others too.

[0] See the explanation at http://www.clisp.org/impnotes/faq.html#faq-menorah-why which starts off with "it's not political" and then provides multiple links to pro-Israeli websites.


I don't see a problem with pro-Israeli websites just as I don't see a problem with pro-Palestinian websites.

Were they lying or something?


I thought the principle you and the other poster were arguing for, was to minimize conflict. In the case of "bro" the conflict arises from a feminist critique of the word's usage in the context of a male dominated industry. In the case of the menorah, the conflict arises from the political controversy of the state of Israel, and its relationship to the Jewish community[0]. I don't have a problem with pro-Feminist websites or anti-Feminist websites, I just think it's professional to avoid stirring up debate with terms or symbols that would likely offend people with a particular viewpoint.

Perhaps you think the feminist viewpoint in this case is objectively correct and therefore deserves more consideration. In that case I would counter that the pro-Palestinian viewpoint is objectively correct. But my original argument was neutral on this issue.

[0] A relationship usually asserted to exist by the supporters of Israel, as is the case here.


I see your point about professionalism.


That's a cool website (on your profile), I miss those sites.


Walk without rhythm/and it won't attract the worm...


I certainly recognize some of these pain points :) the need to register JDKs is not presented in a manner that's easy to understand.

Then there's the warning about unregistered VCS roots. I confess that rather than looking into the meaning of this warning and trying to fix it, I just uninstall the VCS plugin (git in my case) and do revision control outside of IDEA (TortoiseGit).


Really a shame that the most important access method that gives full access can't have 2FA.


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