OT: VISTA

[Will]

narf poit chez BOOM said:

Ack! Kill it kill it kill it!!!

Who thought up that key combo? A demented platform fighter addict?

It's actually quite simple. The vi editor was designed to be used in a console window, with complete lack of pointer control (e.g., a mouse... sorry Narf ). So, the ESC key is just to ensure that you are in command-mode (as opposed to text mode, where doing just Shift-Z-Z would insert two capital Zs wherever the cursor happened to be). Then, IIRC, command ZZ writes the buffer if it has changed, and quits.

But really, the only basic commands you need to know to use vi are:
Esc - get into command mode
Then, once you're in command mode:
i - insert: go into text mode, begin inserting characters at the cursor
:w - write: write the buffer to file
q - quit
h - move cursor left
j - move cursor down
k - move cursor up
l - move cursor right
x - delete: delete the character at the cursor

Really just a few days using it are enough to get a feel for the basics, and start into more advanced things like yy (yank, AKA copy), and p (put, AKA paste) to and from buffers, using the /, s/, g/, etc regular expression commands... it's an absolute lifesaver if you're ever going to encounter a variety of UNIX-y systems, since they are all pretty much guaranteed to have either vi or vim installed.

--edit: almost forgot about the other "real" editor Fyron was looking for... even though it doesn't get any more real than vi
Check out the Scintilla Text Editor (SciTE). It's my "notepad replacement" for Windows, it also has a version for linux. Syntax highlighting for several different languages, brace matching, decent settings tweaking available via GUI, much more powerful tweaking through config files, has option for plaintext search/replace as well as regular expression search/replace, and a bunch of other goodies for programmers.