On Fri, Sep 22, 2000 at 04:03:56PM -0400, hawk wrote:
> amir added,
>
> > On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 01:13:22PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > Huh? vi has insert mode! It's entered by commands like i,a,o,s,c, and their
> > corresponding capitals. I'm not sure whether vi admits to replace mode being
> > separate from insert mode, though.
>
> Maybe things have changed, but we never used to admit that insert was a
> mode rather than i<extended text> being a command. However, with vim
> allowing you to run all over robin hood's barn and use arrow keys and
> deletion in the middle of insertion, it's getting harder to call
> insertion a command rather than a mode . . .
In fact, vi allows you to do some stuff during insert mode too, including ^D
(several flavors) ^T ^H ^W and ^U. Admittedly, most of them are just
glorified backspace, but I still think it's too complicated to call it a
command. Also, "iThis is a sentence" is an absurd command. It would make
writing cheat sheets quite difficult if we wanted to write down every
possible vi command.
> I'll believe the generalization that two hands are better than one,
> yes.
In a desperate move at procrastinating even though I've sworn off LyX
development and other "time-wasters", I wrote a perl script to examine how
much better dvorak was than qwerty. Some results:
File: 300common
299 words
Layout: qwerty abc dvorak
Home row: 5 7 50
Top two rows: 130 109 172
Off Home row: 55 33 2
Left Hand: 23 60 4
Right Hand: 9 4 0
File: alice30h.txt
28169 words
Layout: qwerty abc dvorak
Home row: 1292 515 8095
Top two rows: 11298 8416 14144
Off Home row: 4292 4680 132
Left Hand: 2291 4893 1039
Right Hand: 1163 262 3
File: ispell_eng_0
16467 words
Layout: qwerty abc dvorak
Home row: 41 49 463
Top two rows: 2948 4196 7376
Off Home row: 1166 557 12
Left Hand: 577 1114 58
Right Hand: 117 32 2
The files are the three hundred most common words in English, Alice in
Wonderland (i.e., there are many many repeats of the word "the" in the
results), and the small ispell dictionary. As you can see, dvorak has many
more words only on the home row or on the top two rows, and very few words
typed with just one hand, as compared with qwerty. Of course, a more careful
analysis would look at how often you have to type two letters in a row with
the same hand, or, worse, two different letters with the same finger. (I
think "ed" and "rt" are probably some of the slowest things to type in
qwerty.) Maybe next time I'm in a procrastinatory mood...
> With the modern "control key in exile boards," it becomes necessary to
> use the other hand.
I've never bothered to do this, but I really ought to. I even use the left
shift for Z.
> > In general, you can use ^V to quote unquotables, like Esc. I think in Vim,
> > the ^V'ing is a bit more user friendly, but IIRC, it works just fine in
> > vanilla vi.
>
> Ah, thanks. I thought that that wasn't allowed in regexps, and so
> hadn't tried . . .
I've learned over the years that vi is *way* more powerful than we give it
credit for. I was flabbergasted when I found out you could edit multiple
files & even copy from one to another (admittedly, it's somewhat primitive,
but it works. And vim makes it much less primitive) Complicated search &
replace, complicated motions (like '(' or '%'), and many commands can repeat
several times or take a "motion" argument (e.g., I very often use 'c)' which
changes everything to the end of the sentence, and other such commands.)
-Amir
