On Jul 18, 2006, at 2:33 PM, A.J.Mechelynck wrote:
Marshall Abrams wrote:
As a devotee of vim, I want to put in a vote for trying to make new
releases violate fewer rather than more of existing users'
assumptions (although I know that there are always tradeoffs).
Why should the default color scheme suddenly change when one upgrades?
(Hmm maybe fire suits should go on now.)
Every time I install a new version of vim I have to go and fix some
little thing so that it will work the way I want it to work. The
problems I've experienced recently are due to the fact that I've
been mapping g to 1G for years. In recent releases, matchit.vim
(which I love) and the new fancy file browser have created mappings
for g plus something else, so that vim has to pause when I type g to
make sure that I'm not about to type another character (this is not
the behavior you want for the "go to the top of the file" mapping).
I have fixed these problems, but:
How about adding functions without assigning them to keys? If a key
hasn't been mapped before, then someone has their own private mapping
for it, and by adding a new mapping, you're going to break something,
perhaps for the sake of a function that most people won't use.
(Shouldn't a *network* file browser be optional? I already have more
than one with my operating system. )
Just pet peeves. If I didn't love it so much I wouldn't complain.
Marshall
My answer to that (and it is a personal opinion, not a dogma) is that
most of the alphabetic keys (with or without Shift or Ctrl) are
already assigned in "standard" Vim
I have noticed that, but I'm not a fan of it. Fortunately, I rarely
need the functions assigned to g+something. I occasionally undo my q
mapping in order to record a macro.
(including gg for "go to top" if you don't like the hand movement and
Shift chord required by 1G),
and more of them if possible are likely to get mapped in the future,
so it's "risky business" at best to try mapping one's own functions
I was mapping g long before vim started mapping things to it. So from
my point of view, it was the developers who engaged in risky behavior.
(Let me emphasize that I remain extremely grateful.)
to them. An infamous example of the latter is the mswin.vim "plugin",
which overrides several of the Ctrl-letter keys with its own
"Windows-like" mappings, thus obliterating many useful Vim keystrokes.
OTOH, the F keys (other than F1 and sometimes F10) are available by
default; so my advice is to map "user-defined" mappings to F keys with
or without Shift/Ctrl/Alt, and mappings defined in "unofficial
plugins" to multikey sequences starting with <Leader> <LocalLeader>
etc.
Uggh. F-keys. That's why I kept using Emacs for a long time. Why I
switched to vi for even greater ease. So my fingers wouldn't have to
leave the letter keys. (Esc is an exception, but easy to slap.) Same
reason I don't like editors that make essential use of the mouse.
Let nothing intervene between thought and text.
Best regards,
Tony.
Oh well.
Thanks Tony.
Marshall
