What Gary says is historically true, but I would point out that it was
the fact that deep underneath vi was sitting on ed. Many full-screen
versions of line editors, like teco, suffered from having their wings
tied down close to the lowest assumptions and could not spread them and
soar.
I remember the first time I used h to back up past the beginning of a
line in Vim and fainted dead-away seeing the cursor reappear at the end
of the previous line. I had been using Vim as a replacement for vi on
Windows for a couple of years already before it happened. It's not that
it's amazing functionality, it's that it was completely unexpected after
a couple of decades as a vi jockey. Even today, I never really use that
capability because somehow it just ain't vi, but I admit that it is the
most natural thing in the world to do.
Starting in 1984 and for many years (until I lost the faith around the
Mac OS 8 time frame) I had a parallel night life on the Macintosh and I
long wanted an editor that supported the mouse the way I had come to
expect on that platform plus all the plutonium-powered movement and
text-editing commands of vi. For me, Vim has made good on this promise
although I admit that I never actually block text with a click-and-drag
except if I have to cooperate with another, broken application. Just
being able to put the cursor using the mouse in moments where I seem to
have gravitated to doing that has been bliss. With ctags and now an
Intellisense-like capability, wow! And the best part of all is that it's
on every platform I use (Linux, various Unices and Windows).
I love this Vim! It's God's own editor.
Gary Johnson wrote:
On 2006-11-15, Chuck Mason <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
In gvim you can do i<Del><Esc> or 0i<BS> to join lines. So the need for
(J) is superfluous. Why is there no antithesis to J for splitting
lines?
Because In The Beginning was Vi, and Vi viewed Files as consisting
of sequences of Lines, each Line being a sequence of zero or more
ASCII Characters ending in a Newline. Editing was done by
manipulating lines and the characters _within_ lines; the
terminating newline was never manipulated directly--the user didn't
even have to know how lines were separated. You could split one
line into two lines by typing Return or Enter in insert mode or
replace mode, but the only way to join two lines into one line was
to use the join command (:join or J).
This behavior was common in editors at the time. The model of
treating a file as a single sequence of characters is more recent.
Vim has added features to allow users to manipulate files in that
manner if they choose, but these features have had to use the
limited set of keys that were available after vi had defined most of
them.
So, the reason for the J command was the necessity having such a
command in a line-oriented editor, not to save key strokes. There
was no need for a special command to split lines: typing Return or
Enter already did that. (By that reasoning, one could argue that o
and O are superfluous as well. I don't have a good answer for that,
other than that inserting lines may have been considered by the
designer of vi to be more common that splitting lines.)
HTH,
Gary
