On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 8:12 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro <lawrenced...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sunday, June 19, 2016 at 11:07:23 AM UTC+12, Michael Torrie wrote: >> >> On 06/17/2016 05:52 PM, Chris via Python-list wrote: >>> >>> Any suggestions for a good open source text editor for the Mac out >>> there? For now, I am going to stick with vim. >> >> Good choice. > > The trouble with vim/vi/whatever, is that it doesn’t work like any other > editor on Earth. > > Pull up any old GUI-based editor you like, for example Windows (shudder) > Notepad. If there are N characters in your file, then the insertion point can > be placed at N + 1 positions: in-between two adjacent characters, or before > the first character, or after the last character. And this makes sense: > anything you type is inserted at the insertion point. All rational text > editors (and word processors) work this way. > > But not vi/vim. It only lets you place your cursor *on* a character, not > *in-between* characters. That’s why you need two separate insertion commands, > insert-before and insert-after. And one of those has the interesting side > effect where, if you exit insertion mode without inserting anything, it > doesn’t put you back in the same position as before. Why? > > As to why you need insertion commands at all, that’s another thing... > -- > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
I personally love vim. But its clearly an acquired taste. When you get good at it its pretty amazing -- and no mouse. The other thing about vim is that it is on every linux system, so you don't have to load your editor if you are ssh-ing to some machine -- Joel Goldstick http://joelgoldstick.com/blog http://cc-baseballstats.info/stats/birthdays -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
