On 08/04/10 12:49, John Little wrote:
On Apr 8, 2:44 pm, Duane Johnson<duane.john...@gmail.com> wrote:
When I learned to touch type in high school...
...practice those ones over and over again...
I think you're swimming against the strengths of vim. In vim if you
find yourself doing something over and over again you stop and find a
better way, at the least record a macro.
Regards, John
Yeah, thinking about it, it looks like we're once more against the
conservative <=> progressive theories of learning (Reminds me of a
recent comment I gave on one of Paul Krugman's NYT blog articles).
A conservative learns by rote the same skills and the same prayers which
his great-great-great-grandfather used before him -- I'm just
caricaturing a tiny wee bit ;-) : Learn How Not To Think And You Will Be
A Good Conservative: Curiosity Is Original Sin, And Whoever Is Not With
Us And Of Us, Is Against Us.
A progressist (the conservatives, or at least the Usonian ones, will
say: "a g**damn Commie socialist liberal", which is also a caricature
and worse: a cliché, and false to boot; in other countries conservatives
use other clichés, different in form but similar in intent) learns how
to learn: he has an encyclopaedia and uses it, or maybe he has several,
for he doesn't trust one encyclopaedia to the exclusion of all other
sources of knowledge; he experiments and learns by trial and error; he
reasons about what he's doing; and when undertaking a new task, he
starts by reasoning about what he's going to do. And he's not afraid to
find out about new things, quite the contrary.
Vim is not a tool for the conservative: in Vim (unlike in, er, no, not
Emacs which I used just the five minutes sufficient to see that I would
never be able to learn it, but Notepad, which I can still use if I have
to, e.g. if I'm helping a friend on a computer without a sensible OS --
not an OS made by Torvalds et al., I mean, not even by S. Jobs but
-argh- by Gates's minions -- and where I can't install software)... in
Vim, I was saying, you can't learn everything in any short-enough length
of time. You learn the basic skills in a few hours or a few days (by
running the vimtutor and/or the gvimtutor), you learn how to learn (the
help), and the rest comes to you as needed, little by little, over the
course of a lifetime.
In Vim, for most tasks, there is no "one single way to do them right",
but many; and in the time I've been following this here mailing list,
I've been astonished more than once by the number of different ways to
"do the thing right" that people can come up with (together with, let us
be honest, a goodly number of ways to do it wrong too, but experiment
will always show what works and what doesn't).
In Vim, when starting to do something new, the question is: Now how
shall I dissect that task into elements which I know how to do? and if I
don't know them all, let's find out how to do what I don't yet know how
to. That's why Vim's help is essential: Notepad hardly has any help
worth mentioning, but remove the help and 99% of a user's capabilities
are still there. In Vim, remove the help and I can still use maybe the
25% that I can do without looking them up, but if I can't check the fine
points on the 50% that I know maybe halfway, and find out about the 25%
that I don't know at all, I'm lost. (Socrates: The more I learn, and the
more I see how ignorant I am. Using Vim is like being one of Socrates's
pupils: I've been using it for several years and I still discover new
abilities every day. Yesterday it was the :ilist command, which I didn't
know existed.)
Best regards,
Tony.
--
"One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that
sometimes you must work under adverse conditions ... like a state of
sheer terror."
-- W. K. Hartmann
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