[Gllug] ed vs emacs/vi, was: ed vs emacs, was: OpenMoko Neo Freerunner

[Peter Corlett]

On 13 May 2009, at 18:19, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
[...]
> Well I've just done a few (not massively scientific tests) picking
> moderately distant points in a block of code and timing how long it
> takes me to select the text between them. In pretty much every case  
> the
> mouse takes 3 seconds, the keyboard can take anywhere between 3 and 10
> seconds. Even factoring in  a whole second each way to switch between
> the two (generous if you ask me) that leaves mouse quicker in many
> cases.  If you find it slower maybe your keyboard repeat rate is  
> higher
> than mine, or your mouse is slower, or maybe it's because you're only
> displaying 80 cols where as I'm displaying double that?

Or it's because we've learned how to use our tools. Your hypothetical  
command-line user apparently doesn't know how to navigate around a  
document in their editor except by holding down the cursor keys.  
Apparently they were too lazy to invest the half-hour or so required  
to work through the rather good tutorial that comes with Emacs. I  
routinely navigate around documents and select text using Emacs's  
incremental-search - which is explained about 15-20 minutes into the  
tutorial - and this is very fast and efficient.

There's also the minor detail that I use Aquamacs Emacs, which is a  
variant of GNU Emacs 22 that also acts as a MacOS GUI application,  
complete with menus and Apple-style accelerators on top of the  
existing Emacs functionality. This gives me the best of both worlds.  
So nyaah.


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