go ahead... be a heretic | |
PerlMonks |
Re^5: Word replace - notetab light vs perlby BrowserUk (Patriarch) |
on Oct 09, 2005 at 03:26 UTC ( [id://498501]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
I understand where your coming from, and I know for many, many people vi is the perfect solution. I just don't like vi! I don't like is modality. I don't like that there is no visual indication of which mode it is currently in. And I absolutely hate that I cannot configure it to use the CUA keyboard layout. You can get close-ish, but not close enough. Switching from other applications and command lines which use control-arrow to move the cursor, and control-shift-arrow to select, etc., to an editor (where I spend such a large amount of my keyboard time), that uses alien key sequences to do familiar things, means I not only have to stop and think about what the key sequence is to do what I need to do, but I have to think about where I am first. Add that to trying to remember which damn mode I left it in the last time I switch away from it to another application, and which mode I need to be in for the key sequence I need to work... It is just too frustrating. I realise that if you are using *nix and a shell set up to use vi-style readline etc., then vi makes sense, but still the modality would put me off completely. I also like having menus available for me to find the things I rarely use. My editor runs most of the time in full screen mode where the menus, titlebar, toolbar and other consumers of screen real estate are hidden, but on the rare occasions when I need to use some of the editors more esoteric facilities, they are only one keystroke away from being browsable through the menus. I realise that there are vim and gvim and various other incarnations that probably can do similar things, but that kind of defeats the "available everywhere" benefit. Everytime I have gone looking for help in vi, I've ended up in some peculiar buffer with pseudo-menus and where every damn one of the few keystrokes I do know, no longer does what they did. I can no longer see the code I was editing, and by the time I work out how to get back to where I was, I've forgotten what it was I was looking for in the first place. On more than one occasion I've resorted to switching to another terminal or screen and killing vi, just to get out of the damn Help screen! (or maybe that was emacs?) It's really not a case of being too lazy to learn the standard keyboard mappings. It's that I don't want to learn them. They are, IMO, so fundamentally flawed, neither word-wise mnemonic, nor physically mnemonic (as say the old wordstar key sequences were), and they do not relate to anything else I use. I've said it before, but it makes no sense at all to me to have 104 keys on my keyboard and overlay 30 of them each 3 or 4 times with various modifiers and modes and ignore about half of the rest. When vi was first around, teletypes didn't have cursor pads, and edit pads, and function keys, but that hasn't been the case now for at least 20 years. I'd never attempt to pursuade anyone away from the environment in which they are comfortable and productive. I have had to use vi or emacs (or pico) a few times, sometimes for extended periods. It is not that I cannot do so, I just don't want to. Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
The "good enough" maybe good enough for the now, and perfection maybe unobtainable, but that should not preclude us from striving for perfection, when time, circumstance or desire allow.
In Section
Meditations
|
|