[LMB] AKICIF: touch typing

[James]

On 11/24/06, Sylvus Tarn <sylvus at rejiquar.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-11-23 at 21:39 -0800, James wrote:
> > Unfortunately, I picked up
> > vi within a week while I was struggling with Emacs for years.
[snip]
> So I struggled with it, eventually got
> reasonably good (for my purposes at least) and even learned to love some
> functions (yank rectangle-block of text---never seen that command
> anywhere else, and it's perfect for chopping out all the permissions and
> junk out of a list of file names) and all was basically happy with the
> world.

In Vim:

In command mode (or just <Esc> to be sure), navigate to one corner of
rectangular area, Ctrl-Q (Windows) or Ctrl-V (other OS), navigate to
diagonally opposite corner, command ('y' to yank, 'I' to insert before
block, 'A' to insert after block, 'x' to delete, 'r' to replace
everything in block with a character, '~' to change case, etc).

('v' in command mode takes you to "visual" mode, which is basically a
highlighted select operation (however, in gVim, 'visual' mode isn't
the same as if you dragged with the mouse). Ctrl-V (or Ctrl-Q) turns
it into arbitrary rectangular mode ("visual block").

And why Ctrl-Q on Windows? Ctrl-V is already mapped to a function -
paste from Windows clipboard (independent of other vim registers,
though the clipboard can be accessed as register + (so copy is select
in visual, "+y).

I just seem to pick it up easily. Maybe because I don't have to know
all the oddball key sequences in order to do stuff. (Trickiest part in
vim was the hjkl navigation keys, though modern versions of vi also
accept cursor keys).

The most interesting times are had when you're using a terminal whose
only forms of cursor control is the backspace (^H) character, aka the
dumb-tty. Editing one line at a time gets interesting since your
history buffer gets really confusing since navigating to a new line
means printing it out, scrolling your last line up one. (Effectively,
you have a 1 line high edit window).

The other thing that really killed emacs for me was the genius who
mapped Ctrl-H to "Help". Any normal terminal these days (e.g.,
vt100-ish) has "Backspace" mapped to generate Ctrl-H. You won't see it
in the GUI versions, but over a telnet/ssh session, ugh. (These days,
I guess if I'm forced to use Emacs, I should look at viper mode. I
suppose besides being practically it's own OS, it has to have vi keys
of its own!).