Happy Friday! We haven't had a holy war in a long time.
On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 12:04:07PM +1000, Allan Rae wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, hawk wrote:
>
> > vile heretics, all :)
>
> C-c C-m Two keystrokes (4 keys)
> C-c m again two keystrokes (3 keys)
>
> How often would you do this? Not as often as saving I would expect which
> is:
>
> C-x C-s Two keystrokes (3 keys) one hand (adjacent keys)
>
> vs that abomination vi (and it really is Friday as I write this not late
> Thursday afternoon as your emails datestamp indicated for you!! Hummphf)
Happy Olympics!
> S-: w Enter Three keystrokes (4 keys) two hands (all over the place)
I believe Dvorak found that two hands is *better* than one. The two
sequences probably take about the same amount of time, since x and s are
both typed with the same finger, so there's a penalty, and C- is far away,
compared to S-, but Enter is even farther. But actually, arguing about
"save" is silly.
When I'm editing a program, I do a whole lot of cutting and pasting
(commands like D, dd, p), going to the beginning or end of a line, to the
next or previous word, or to a matching parenthesis (0,$,w,b,%), searching
(/), deleting or replacing a letter (x,r), or transposing two (xp) . I do
these way way way more often than saving. Think of it like optimizing code:
it doesn't matter how expensive commands like save are -- it's the commands
you do every few seconds that really matter.
Btw, by far the best aspect of vi is the good old "." command, which just
repeats the last thing you did. Or &, to repeat the last substitution.
> If vi is so popular why isn't there a vi binding for LyX?
Because LyX is a totally different application. Programming often requires
lots of small changes to text. Writing a paper does require small changes,
but also more straight typing of paragraphs, for which it doesn't really
matter whether you have vi or emacs bindings. Which is why although I use
mutt for mail now, I didn't mind using pine's pico, since it was fine for
just writing letters.
OTOH, I have wished for some vi bindings at times. For things like skipping
word-by-word. 'w' is easier than C-S-right. But the other problem with
LyX-vi bindings is that the "insert-mode" concept can't mix with LyX.
(Those who really think that knowing whether you're in insert mode or not is
so complicated that you can't use vi will be happy to know that vim actually
tells you when you're in insert mode.)
-Amir
