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

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Wed, 13 May 2009, Joel Bernstein wrote:

> On 13 May 2009, at 20:07, Peter Corlett wrote:
> 
> > On 13 May 2009, at 19:04, Joel Bernstein wrote: [...]
> > > Does it also have a visual selection mode that lets you select
> > > from current cursor point to 3 lines down up to the 5th "f"
> > > character on the line in half a dozen keystrokes?
> >
> > > I'm not an emacs user so can't speak for their camp, but vi(m) is
> > > less an editor and more a way to turn your keyboard into a gamepad
> > > for navigating and modifying text files.
> >
> > In emacs:
> >
> > <down> <down> <down> C-s f C-s C-s C-s C-s

Surely that just moves the cursor?  How many keys do you need to yank
that in to a buffer?  Frankly it looks lame, don't you have some
sort of numeric prefix to the search or movement keys?
 
> In vi:
> 
> v3j5ff

Beautiful :)

This reminds me of times I've walked people through remote fixing Unix
boxes.  I can get them to vi /etc/whatever and then know in my head what
it'll look like purely from letters I'm throwing at them over the phone,
searches and yanks, movements & paste.  Enough to get eth0 configured
and sshd running so I could take over, start X with some card game so
they don't get bored and get on with the rest of the config!

"There's nothing but some cryptic text and loads of tildas"
"That's fine, type vbeuwgvfue578e2gvfyugr780g^[:wq^Mifup eth0" *
"Erm, it's just put a gui up, and now solitare has started"
"Yep, you just have a play, I'm in now and fixing..."


Damion

*I invented those controls for an example with randomly hitting the
keyboard, but you get the idea.
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