[Gllug] vi vs emacs (repeat)

[Nix]

On Mon, 7 Mar 2005, David Damerell prattled cheerily:
> On Monday, 7 Mar 2005, Nix wrote:
>>The editor is strongly modal: you're typing text or doing other things,
>>never both at once, and you need to explicitly switch (ESC goes one way,
>>`i' and `a' and a myriad of other keystrokes go the other way).
> 
> I dispute that vi is modal - any more than Emacs is modal because you
> are in "minibuffer command mode" whenever you type M-x. vi has insert

But you are not, as the minibuffer is just another buffer in a confined
space. `C-x o' takes you straight out of there and back into the
buffers.

This is just recursion: you're in a recursive command loop, is all.
That doesn't stop you from navigating to other buffers and doing things
in them (indeed, I do it all the time and find Emacs unusable if
`enable-recursive-minibuffers' is nil).

(See also
<http://www.esperi.demon.co.uk/nix/xemacs/personal/mininumber.el>.)

> commands and they take potentially lengthy arguments, that's
> all. Thinking of "insert mode" discourages useful tricks which use
> insert commands as part of more complex structures.

While this is true, it's rather counterintuitive, isn't it? I know that
when I'm typing things I don't *think* of all the text I'm typing as
a titanic postfixed argument to the command I happened to use to
start the typing.

> A proper vi user uses :wq not ZZ. :-)

I always used :wq.

Why *does* it have a near-duplicate command in the shape of ZZ, anyway?

-- 
> ...Hires Root Beer...
What we need these days is a stable, fast, anti-aliased root beer
with dynamic shading. Not that you can let just anybody have root.
 --- John M. Ford
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