Josh Mōller-MaraEmacs is great for sysadmins, too
I work as a Unix Systems Administrator for UC Berkeley's Rescomp and it occasionally comes up that sysadmins generally prefer vim while programmers prefer Emacs. The reasoning for this is that vim or vi is generally more available on servers and generally has a more consistent interface across servers. That is, if you use Emacs, you generally have a hefty .emacs file, and using an unconfigured Emacs is painful.
I think it's no longer the case that Emacs isn't installed by default. I've only ever had to use vim a handful of times, and the only thing I really needed to know was how to
- Insert text (i)
- Save & Exit (Esc : wq ENTER)
However, I'm a sysadmin that prefers Emacs, and there are a number of reasons why using Emacs is very helpful for sysadminning.
Dired
Dired mode is Emacs's visual "directory editor", and it makes navigating and operating on files much easier than just using the command line.
Using marks
One task that's very easy in Dired that's really cumbersome to do elsewhere is repeated grepping. Say, for example, that I want to find files with "hello" in them. In Dired I do this by pressing % g and entering the string.
And what I get is a number of marked files (in orange), that I can easily, among other things:
- copy (C)
- move/rename (R) (even to another server with Tramp!)
- change the mode of (M)
- run a shell command on (!)
Now I can filter out files that don't match by pressing t k (which toggles, then kills lines).
Now say I forgot that I also need the files to contain "world" somewhere in them. I just repeat the process by pressing % g again and entering "world" to get a list of marked files that contain both "hello" and "world".
And now it's really easy to do any operations on them.
In bash, however, it feels a little more clumsy for me. It's possible to search by doing:
grep -l "hello" .
But if I remember later that it also has to contain "world", I have to go edit the last command to be:
grep -lr hello . | xargs grep -l world
And now I just get a list of files. Say now that I want to copy these files somewhere. I have to again tack on another command, like so:
grep -lr hello . | xargs grep -l world | xargs -n1 -i cp {} /some/directory
It gets really cumbersome, and it requires you to remember how to use substitute arguments like {} in xargs. And you might also have to hope your file names don't contain whitespace. With Dired, you really don't have to worry about these kinds of things. Dired's marking system makes a bunch of operations super convenient.
Edit Dired
"Edit Dired" mode also just makes it so much easier to rename files in bulk. Instead of having to think of a regexp or sed expression to ...