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 (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 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.
Best regards,
Tony.