On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 10:28 AM, Ben Fritz <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Oct 15, 2:43 pm, Donald Allen <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Yes, disabling the viminfo stuff, which I was not aware of, eliminates > this > > behavior. I find it very odd that this is enabled by default. I think > most > > people think of different editing sessions as different editing sessions, > > not a continuation of a previous session. > > > > But thank you for getting me straightened out about why this is > occurring. > > > > The previous search being enabled by default can be a bit confusing, > but looking at :help 'viminfo' you can see why: it's not really saving > the last search, it's saving a search history! This means if you spend > a long time coming up with a complicated regex, it will likely be > there when you come back, just by pressing <Up> a few times on the > search command-line. This feature is useful enough to be enabled by > default, though you can disable it by adding a "/0" to your 'viminfo' > option. > I agree that it's useful, but disagree that it should be enabled by default. I believe strongly in The Principle of Least Surprise. In other words, I think people are most comfortable with software when they can develop a mental model, over a reasonable period of time, of how the software works. This is especially important with something as complex as vim. I'm a *very* experienced computer professional, now retired (I wrote my first computer program in 1960!), and one of the biggest frustrations I have with vim is that it frequently surprises me. I think the issue is partly the choice of defaults and partly the inscrutability of the documentation. It could also be familiarity, and I concede that. I am a relative late-comer to the efficiency of the vi interface, having spent almost 40 years as an Emacs user (Richard Stallman first implemented Emacs on top of a line editor, Teco, a bit like the vi/ex relationship, that ran on the PDP-6/PDP-10 ICS systems at MIT and also on the Tenex system we developed at BBN for the PDP-10). But I've been using vim long enough now, and have spent enough time reading documentation, that it feels like I should not be surprised as often as I am. Here I'm simply relying on my years of experience in learning to use tools like this. I'm sure the reaction of some will be "then don't use it!". That may well happen, but I do feel that vim is extremely good work, but that it has some serious flaws. Whether the net is positive for me or not remains for me to decide, taking into account the other alternatives for a vi-like editor. /Don > > -- > You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. > Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. > For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php > -- You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
