Bram Moolenaar wrote:
Mostly PageUp and PageDown do the reverse of each other. If you mean that the cursor has moved, that is a completely different thing.
I'm not sure what "completely different thing" adds. I'm just trying to respond to your call for suggestions on how to make Vim more attractive to new users. I know a couple of people who don't like the fact that, in Vim, PageUp does not reverse PageDown. Naturally I am talking about the cursor moving.
Switching off search highlighting is part of the tutor. People who skip the vimtutor are going to run into trouble anyway.
OK - but you could make Vim more attractive if (when enabled by some new option) pressing Escape in Normal mode cleared search highlights and cleared the message line.
I do agree that good defaults are important. But backwards compatibility is also important. It's not always easy to make a choice.
Suggestion: Provide a simple way for a user to invoke a standard set of predefined mappings. In fact, there could be various predefined "themes" that insert useful settings into vimrc. Then, I could write an email to a friend saying "Run gvim and do <stuff to select a theme>. Then you can press F11 to do <clever thing>". For example, perhaps F11 = ":cn", Shift-F11 = ":cp". Naturally there would be a lot of different opinion on what should be included. Anything would be better than the current situation where I have to convince a prospective new user to become a guru before they can use some of Vim's brilliant features. John
