> <tangential-rant-about-greatness-of-digraphs> > > it is true that in mappings you can use <C-r>, etc instead of digraphs. > however, i've found that for recording macros on the fly it's very > helpful to know your digraphs -- particularly if you ever edit your > macros after recording. [...] > </tangential-rant-about-greatness-of-digraphs>
<helpful-info-about-what-these-are-and-easier-way-to-enter-them> Well, technically these aren't digraphs. They are control characters. Digraphs in this context are just a way Vim provides to enter them. In my opinion, though, a better/easier way to enter these control characters, if you really want to, is to type CTRL-V before them. You don't need to know what the actual control codes are then (or the Vim abbreviations for them--many of them are three-letter codes), you just type, e.g., CTRL-V CTRL-A and, ^A (the control character) is inserted. If you're on Windows with CTRL-V mapped to Paste, you use CTRL-Q instead. :help i_CTRL-V Also :help i_CTRL-V_digit And :help c_CTRL-V is for the commandline, but basically the same So, really, I don't think it's helpful to know your digraphs at all. Though it is helpful to know the CTRL-V/CTRL-Q trick. </helpful-info-about-what-these-are-and-easier-way-to-enter-them> <rant-about-limited-value-of-rightly-called-control-characters> But even so, I prefer the <> notation. This is partly because control characters have other meanings. ^L means form feed (abbreviation FF--meaning start a new page), ^M and ^J are carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF), and you often can't include them because they are used as line separators in text files, ^I is a tab (HT--horizontal tab) so often becomes invisible, ^Z was used in DOS to mean end-of-file and some programs still choke on it, ^Q and ^S (DC1 and DC3--device control) often make terminals start and stop respectively so can mess things up (though they aren't used usually in Vim for precisely that reason). In short, control characters can have unwanted side effects when you include them in text files, depending what you do with those files. As a general practice, in configuration files, representations such as using <> notation that do not use control characters are better. But yes, certainly if you want to record and edit macros and then reuse them, you must use the control characters and not the <> notation, and I indeed do that from time to time, so I agree it's handy to know for in-memory Vim work. For reference, explanations of the ASCII control codes are here: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/c0.html </rant-about-limited-value-of-rightly-called-control-characters> Ben. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
