Bram Moolenaar wrote:
No, I don't want that. Pressing ESC is to get back to Normal mode, it should not have side effects like this.
OK. But my suggestion was not that ESC would go to Normal mode _and_ clear highlighting. My proposal was that if I start in Insert mode, then press ESC I would be in Normal mode (as normal :), but if I press ESC again then highlighting and message text would be cleared. I'm happy so long as you've heard my idea. A couple of people here seem to think that _I_ want these suggestions. Not at all. I'm fluent in Vim and don't need any of my proposals for myself. But my recent experience of trying to make Vim attractive to a programmer moving into Linux showed me that some simple changes to Vim might make it a lot more attractive to new users.
You appear to assume that what you want is what everybody wants.
No! For posterity let me record that I am not one of those people. I'm only making these suggestions because I know you want to promote Vim usage, and some way to easily invoke a pre-defined set of behaviour for a modern PC would help IMHO.
Imagine how many exceptions we need to handle in the documentation: "if you use theme X then this doesn't work and you need to type XYZ".
I take your point and agree. But I will make one final suggestion: Do not hide how Vim works. Tell users about vimrc, and what a mapping is, etc. People who would use Vim are smart, and can instantly understand that there is a config file, and that keys can be mapped. But a new user will probably not want to take the time to work out the details and their optimum settings right now. Take the wonderful quickfix window (which I use mainly for vimgrep). Using quickfix with ':copen' etc just doesn't work for me. I don't mind typing a few commands, but in this situation, the commands interfere too much with my thoughts. Once I mapped keys for :copen, :cn and :cp, quickfix was a magnificent feature. My vague concept about a "theme" is that it would insert text into vimrc. The user would be told this, and they could modify the text to taste. Right now, it is pretty easy to get BufExplorer working, and then \be is the default key sequence to start it. That's like what I am proposing for other killer features of Vim.
You can always tell someone to download your script and use it.
There are too many tips and scripts already. I was hoping (*not* for me!) to integrate some of the best work procedures into one or two pre-defined behaviours. John
