Warning: Religion follows: On 9/25/07, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, A.T.Hofkamp wrote: > > > On 2007-09-25, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > wrote: > > > >> Why does it "choose" to modify your position when you exit insert mode? > > > > Try to insert 1 character in the middle of a line. You'll end up at the > > same position. Now press 'j' (one line down), then '.' (do it again). > > I believe that's why. > > > > Great when you have nicely formatted columns of code underneath each > > other. > > It's strange, but in nearly 30 years of writing code in dozens of different > languages, I've never felt the urge to line up my code in columns. Never. > (Apart from assembly language, which I suspect you don't want to hear > about.) > > > The cost of that power is a command/insert mode and a steep learning > > curve. > > That's another issue, that of ROI. Having learnt the vi/vim keystrokes, what > does that enable you to do? Use vi/vim, and that's it. Whereas I've found > other situations where subsets of Emacs keystrokes are recognized, such as > anything that uses GNU readline (including the Python console--see, this IS > relevant to Python after all), and pico/nano. These are all extra goodies > that are to be found on the way up the Emacs learning curve.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a few vim commands that have come in handy. I can search through a webpage in Firefox by using the same '/' search command that vim has. The movement keys (h,j,k,l) are the same as in any paging program I've ever used. Not to mention that I learned regexes by learning 's/regex/replacement' first :-) > > > For example, ever wondered why you on earth you need CTL-C and CTL-V to > > copy/paste? Why not simply select with the mouse, then right-click to > > paste? > > Or better still, why not allow both? > > >> And the downside is that the largest single proportion of those commands > >> end up being variations on "enter insert mode". Because most of the > >> keystrokes you enter during an editing session are in fact text to be > >> input into the file, not commands to manipulate that text. So in a modal > >> editor, having to > > > > Depends on what you are doing. When entering new code, yes. When > > maintaining code, no (lots of small changes). > > Making lots of small changes is even worse--it means you're jumping into > insert mode for shorter times, more frequently. If you're making lots of small changes, then you shouldn't be jumping into insert mode at all, IMO. > > And that's when you discover something else: that how you delete text in > vi/vim differs, depending on whether it's something you just inserted while > currently in insert mode, or whether it was there from before you last > entered insert mode: in the former case, you use backspace to delete, in > the latter case, you can't use backspace, you have to use "X". What does > backspace do when not in insert mode? It just moves you through the text. > What does the forward-delete key do? In both modes, it actually deletes > text! Actually, vim always deletes the same way regardless of when it was inserted -- one of the many *improvements* over vi. That's my religion anyway ;-), but I thought this was a python mailing list ;-) Jason > > At least with Emacs, text is text--it doesn't matter when it was inserted, > it still behaves the same way. > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
