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

[Joel Bernstein]

On 14 May 2009, at 13:39, - Tethys wrote:

> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Joel Bernstein <joel at fysh.org> wrote:
>
>> I find I use marks very rarely. Typically only for jumping the cursor
>> between two points in the same file. Typically though I would use two
>> windows onto the same buffer to achieve that though. I use visual
>> selection mode a lot though (I like the word-selection keys etc, like
>> "iw" for inner-word etc) and would miss that. Is it present in nvi,
>> elvis and so on?
>
> No, AFAIK neither nvi or elvis have visual select. I wasn't aware of
> vim's concept of an "inner word" before you mentioned it. I'm a little
> confused about its purpose, though. What does it give you that you
> couldn't do already with e/E?

Well, it was just an example. You *could* use <count>e and so on, but  
there are lots of others which it saves time for. 'aw' includes the  
trailing space. 'is' selects a sentence. 'as' selects sentence +  
space, and so on. 'i(' selects everything inside ()s excluding the  
()s. 'a(' includes the ()s. And obviously these all accept a count  
prefix modifier saying how many times to select. I find all of this  
adds up to telling the editor /what/ to do rather than exactly how I  
want it done. Others might disagree.

I recall a previous post in the thread commenting that the time taken  
to learn a proper editor is massively paid back by the time saved in  
using it. That's certainly been my experience. After a while it  
becomes muscle memory. I contend that, at least for dynamic languages,  
a well configured Vim + plugins *is* an IDE.

Then again, one of the best and most prolific developers I know uses  
original Bill Joy vi and swears that *the shell* is his IDE. And  
having watched him at work I agree. He tends to use dtach to launch  
his vi instances and to have lots of backgrounded processes at once.  
It's productive as hell in his setup. I find it a bit /too/ minimal  
myself but have worked that way before.

/joel
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