Hi Donald! On Mo, 17 Okt 2011, Donald Allen wrote:
> 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. I think Vim behaves like that for very long. So I cannot believe that this is surprising to you. Backwards compatibility is one of Brams main concerns. May be you were using a pure Vi and not Vim and are now surprised of the "Improved" features from Vim? Then perhaps you should use Vim in compatible mode. regards, Christian -- 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
