thelinuxlink.net

Hey guys,
I just wanted to comment on the last show you did with the guest (his name escapes me atm). When Linc said that he used vi because it was just a text editor, I think that could create some confusion among those looking at text editors to use.

Now, I haven't really tried EMACS too much, but vi is by no means the poor cousin. If you leaf through this book:

http://ivan.tubert.org/doc/vimbook.pdf

you will get an idea of just how powerful vi can be. About three weeks ago I took it upon myself to stop using the arrow keys for navigating a text file, and using HJKL instead, and let me tell you, I can edit files much faster. Now I am trying to use all the tips in the aforesaid book to increase my productivity.

Anyway, I'm sure you know about all this Linc, this is just more for anyone new to linux that is looking at an editor to use.

PS: I now have xinerama running on my home machine with two monitors, and I have a session that I reference with "source session.vim;" this session does some really cool things:

1)expand the main window to both monitors
2)make one main editing window on the left screen
3)make one secondary editing window on the right screen, with two file explorers on the right of that
4)load up the file explorers with whatever directory I happen to be hacking on

The file explorers are tied to whatever "window" is active in vim, so it makes it way easier than opening up a terminal, finding what you want to edit, then executing gvim.

Yeah! Slap Linc upside the head!

I like nano, its easy to learn and use. I also use kate when I don't feel like opening up the terminal I have heard Vim is very powerfull perhaps I will learn on how to use it. I have only toyed with it for 10mins or so.

dann wrote:Yeah! Slap Linc upside the head!

Heh! Vim is the shit!

CptnObvious999 wrote:I like nano, its easy to learn and use. I also use kate when I don't feel like opening up the terminal I have heard Vim is very powerfull perhaps I will learn on how to use it. I have only toyed with it for 10mins or so.

Yeah, I remember the days back when I was a new convert to linux, and was looking at kate saying "Wow, it does syntax highlighting!" Back then I thought you needed some IDE to do that kind of stuff, and I always hated Borland and VC++.

If you do any programming whatsoever, read the section in the book about recording (with the 'q' key), toward the beginning. I guarantee you will find uses for that immediately. I used to try to frame all my repetative editing tasks into the form of a regular expression for substitution, but now I can just record the steps I take, then "replay" the action however many times I want.

One of the most powerful things about Vi(m) is its ubiquitous nature - you will be hard pushed to find a *nix system that doesn't have it installed by default - it might not be Vim, but there will be a 'vi' symlink to something, and it will use Vi syntax. I don't think any other editor can claim that.

HJKL sure flows on my Dvorak keyboard

Man, I would love to get used to one of those keyboards, but I don't want to have to buy one for home and work. Have you gotten noticeably faster with it?

bosshoff wrote: If you do any programming whatsoever, read the section in the book about recording (with the 'q' key), toward the beginning. I guarantee you will find uses for that immediately. I used to try to frame all my repetative editing tasks into the form of a regular expression for substitution, but now I can just record the steps I take, then "replay" the action however many times I want.

For very simple edits, even that is not necessary. The period "." will repeat the last edit at your current location. You can do a search, edit, hit 'n' to search for the next match, hit '.' to repeat the edit, etcetera to the end of the file. There are so many time saving features it's hard to learn even a small part of the total.