Warning personal rant follows.
Over the years I have used a number of different flavours of Unix/Linux. Unix flavour I have used include AIX (IBM), SunOS/Solaris (Was Sun, now Oracle), IRIX (SGI), HPUX (HP), Ultrix (DEC). Linux flavours include Suse, Mandrake, Mandriva, Redhat, Fedora, DSL, Puppy and many more.
When I first started with AIX, I had come from the world of the Apple Macintosh that was all nice a fluffy - you did most things point and click (except for development). The shock was large, I had to write some shell scripts and some C programs. vi was the most unpleasant piece of crap I had ever seen. So I took a couple of days out and compiled emacs on the AIX machine. For the next year or so was happy in the world of emacs.
That was of course until a machine had a major issue and I needed to start it in maintenance mode. Then you get a scaled back OS to fix the machine with, and you guessed it vi was the editor.
Over time I then had to administer other machines with other versions of Unix, some of these had emacs, but all had vi. It suddenly dawned on me I need to take the time to learn vi. From that point forward I have never looked back, I would struggle now to drive emacs.
The thing that has become clear to me in the world of computer administration is take the time to learn all the standard tools and the standard ways to do things - if you rely of having a customised environment you will spend a lot of time building the custom environment each time you have a new machine to look after, rather than getting on with the job at hand.
The world is different if your job is that of programmer and you spend all your time on one computer, customise your environment on the machine, to minimise the amount of time doing all the other activities that do not involve writing code.
I expect all aspiring linux/unix sysadmins to learn vi, sed, awk, shell scripting and even perl. The mark of a true sysadmin is when the GUI starts the first application they run is a terminal to get to the command line, and this is where they spend most their time. Otherwise you are just a hobbyist (there is nothing wrong with having a hobby), and the title System Administrator becomes devalued.
Also take the time to learn as many tools and technologies as you can. Each one you learn makes you more valuable to the world of IT, gives you more depth and once you move to jobs where you are given the task to architect a system you have a better understanding of more tools. Too many systems are built using the wrong tools just because they are the only ones people know.
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