On Sat, 24 Mar 2007 19:47:40 +1200, "John Little" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I suspect that on Bill Joy's original keyboard a colon was not a > shifted key press. Ex's command prompt was a colon. When the vi(sual) command was added to ex it made sense for the temporary escape to ex mode to be a colon as well. I don't see a problem with having to use shift. There are really only two types of ex command used from vi: the infrequently used commands like :quit and :set, which occur only once or twice a session, and commands like :s that are capable of making so many changes at once that the overhead of having to use the shift key is small for the amount of work done. -- Matthew Winn
