I don't think you got what _I_ wrote. I'll highlight this inline.

On Jan 22, 6:14 am, jamesj <[email protected]> wrote:
> just a few key strokes, then, so much the better.  To me coding speed/
> ease does matter when trying to capture key thoughts.

I specifically mentioned that the mouse isn't usually slower than 'a
few key strokes', it just feels that way. Also, your cavalier attitude
to hopping from one plugin to the next is not at all born out in real
life: Keyboard shortcuts are one of the toughest, most unforgiving
learning curves out there. For certain jobs its worth investing the
effort to learn them, but you certainly can't go 'hopping from one
[keyboard shortcuts] plugin to the next' if you intend to get familiar
with even a fraction of any of them. Installing a vi plugin into
eclipse is a very serious commitment unless you're already familiar
with vi.

>
> It is interesting to see a reaction that is so stereotypical.  Because
> I suggest using an "old school" tool, you only made it a few sentences
> before you imply that I "suck" at using tools correctly, I refactor by
> hand, and am a "dumb text terminal genius".

Yes, of course. It's rather obvious that you suck at using tools
correctly if you honestly believe that the vi plugin is the biggest
productivity win that you've experienced in eclipse. Also, being a
'dumb text terminal genius' is a compliment; while its a silly plan to
treat code as dumb text, there's plenty of editing your average
computer user has to do where the data really is a stream of
characters (=dumb text) and not a tree of nodes. If you need to write
a bunch of prose-heavy stuff, such as HTML with a lot of textual
content or, lets say documentation in LaTeX, then your vi skills will
come in quite handy. Not as handy as you think, partly due to that
pesky psychologic issue that using a mouse 'feels' slow but isn't, but
nevertheless, useful skillset to have then. However, you may take it
as an insult in the sense that I'm accusing you of applying your one
hammer here; you're so familiar with treating stuff as a stream of
characters that you (ab)use this skill in places where there are
better tools available (i.e: Refactor scripts, eclipse debugger), and
in an environment where modifying the stream is not nearly as
important as other bits (i.e: Reading it, navigating to elements by
its hierarchy instead of by its textual content or source file
position).

> Side note:  Thanks, Dick for your "fanboy rants" on Scala.

It's a bit disingenuous to start painting honest useful advice from
other folks as a 'fanboy rant' in other to make your OP sound better.
Nevertheless, I'll admit keyboard navigating skills can be useful to a
programmer, even if not generally when programming (we sometimes have
to write documentation too, or, _GASP_, an xml config file. The
horror!).

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