John Beckett wrote:
A.J.Mechelynck wrote:
I personally recommend to create the following as $HOME/_vimrc
(or $HOME/.vimrc) immediately after first installation, and to
add tweaks as one gets going:
...
Good advice, as always, Tony. But I am trying to crack a different
nut.
In the BOF talk, Bram really was asking for ideas on what would make
new users flock to Vim.
These days there are a lot of really good editors. No one is going
to spend a couple of hours methodically working through vimtutor
(sorry Bram!). A new user is just going to try Vim as an editor. If
the default Vim behaviour confuses or upsets the user, Vim will
never be used again.
I sense an attitude here that it's just the luser's loss if they
don't learn how to use Vim. Fair enough, but there should be a way
for a non-vi user to enter a command telling Vim "I'm one of those
95% of people who use a modern PC - please switch to a useful mode".
"Easy Vim" and mswin.vim were written for exactly that purpose, and IMHO they
cripple Vim to almost complete _un_usefulness. Vim is a very powerful editor,
but to be able to use it, you need at the very least to understand the
difference between Normal mode and Insert mode. To use it like the fine tool
it is, you need to study, just like one needs to study to become a concert
pianist. If you're "one of those 95% of users who need to be led by the hand
by their OS and editor", and are too dumb for a modal editor, go use Notepad
and stop bugging us.
I had the experience of advising a very competent programmer who got
a job working on virtual memory in the Linux kernel (previously he
had only dabbled in Linux, and had developed under Windows).
At the time, we couldn't meet, and I was restricted to providing
advice via email. Let me tell you, it is pretty well impossible to
convince someone to use Vim via email. The guy wanted to do stuff
right now, and I would send some 100-line email with instructions on
how he could do this and that to vimrc, and then everything would be
simple.
One problem was how search highlighting is persistent (which is
great), but it is very distracting to some people when you want to
turn your attention to another issue. Telling him how to map a key
to do ':nohl' is just unnecessary mumbo jumbo.
John
Why not just type ":noh" at the keyboard then, if you can't use a mapping?
Best regards,
Tony.
