Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-10-04 04:37:52 - Graham Ellis
I started doing Solaris training in the early 1990s - it seems an age ago (probably because it is an age ago!) and one of the courses we did was an "Introduction to Solaris" course which ran for 2 days and had a quarter day or so on the vi editor. With the takeoff of our Perl and Java courses in the late 1990s, I gave up the contract Solaris training simply because there weren't enough weeks in the year and thought I was done with teaching vi.
We're now moving to a time where many web site owners are moving up from using shared space on ISP machines to running their own servers, typically Linux based, and typically based away from the site owner's desk - indeed, we have just bought such a system ourselves. With such a system comes the need to know how to look after a Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl / PHP system (LAMP) and I find myself teaching LAMP Deployment courses.
It's almost like things have gone full circle; people need to be able to remote-edit (perhaps just tiny changes) configuration files. And what else to use but vi? Once again, I find myself teaching vi - though this time a "micro-vi" introduction of a bare minimum of commands, in a session that runs for about half an hour. If you're interested, I've put the text on line in our solution centre