The abrasive tone of your reply is uncalled for. I was sharing something
I've found extremely useful in my (frankly, very short) time using vim. If I
understand correctly, then the initiator of this thread also found it useful
and I'm quite pleased.

Thanks, however, for the <C-v> tip -- i didn't know there was an easier way
to enter control characters.

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 3:46 AM, Ben Schmidt
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:

>
> > <tangential-rant-about-greatness-of-digraphs>
> >
> > it is true that in mappings you can use <C-r>, etc instead of digraphs.
> > however, i've found that for recording macros on the fly it's very
> > helpful to know your digraphs -- particularly if you ever edit your
> > macros after recording.
> [...]
> > </tangential-rant-about-greatness-of-digraphs>
>
> <helpful-info-about-what-these-are-and-easier-way-to-enter-them>
>
> Well, technically these aren't digraphs. They are control characters.
> Digraphs in this context are just a way Vim provides to enter them.
>
> In my opinion, though, a better/easier way to enter these control
> characters, if you really want to, is to type CTRL-V before them. You
> don't need to know what the actual control codes are then (or the Vim
> abbreviations for them--many of them are three-letter codes), you just
> type, e.g., CTRL-V CTRL-A and, ^A (the control character) is inserted.
> If you're on Windows with CTRL-V mapped to Paste, you use CTRL-Q
> instead.
>
> :help i_CTRL-V
> Also :help i_CTRL-V_digit
> And :help c_CTRL-V is for the commandline, but basically the same
>
> So, really, I don't think it's helpful to know your digraphs at all.
> Though it is helpful to know the CTRL-V/CTRL-Q trick.
>
> </helpful-info-about-what-these-are-and-easier-way-to-enter-them>
>
> <rant-about-limited-value-of-rightly-called-control-characters>
>
> But even so, I prefer the <> notation. This is partly because control
> characters have other meanings. ^L means form feed (abbreviation
> FF--meaning start a new page), ^M and ^J are carriage return (CR) and
> line feed (LF), and you often can't include them because they are used
> as line separators in text files, ^I is a tab (HT--horizontal tab) so
> often becomes invisible, ^Z was used in DOS to mean end-of-file and some
> programs still choke on it, ^Q and ^S (DC1 and DC3--device control)
> often make terminals start and stop respectively so can mess things up
> (though they aren't used usually in Vim for precisely that reason). In
> short, control characters can have unwanted side effects when you
> include them in text files, depending what you do with those files.
> As a general practice, in configuration files, representations such as
> using <> notation that do not use control characters are better.
>
> But yes, certainly if you want to record and edit macros and then reuse
> them, you must use the control characters and not the <> notation, and I
> indeed do that from time to time, so I agree it's handy to know for
> in-memory Vim work.
>
> For reference, explanations of the ASCII control codes are here:
>
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/c0.html<http://www.cs.tut.fi/%7Ejkorpela/chars/c0.html>
>
> </rant-about-limited-value-of-rightly-called-control-characters>
>
> Ben.
>
>
>
>
>
> >
>


-- 
Christopher Suter

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