On Tue 19 May 2009 at 10:56:15 PDT Gene Kwiecinski wrote: > >>Once I'd established the habit of exiting vi/vim this way, it was easy >>to remember to use 'w' by itself to write the file without exiting, and >>to use 'q!' to quit while discarding any changes. >>For me, it's not about saving keystrokes, it's about building a >coherent >>mental model of the command set. > >For little-used functionality where you might need to "stop and think", >agreed, but virtually *every* time you edit a file, you need to save >it, so...
Yeah, I agree, it's been years since I've had to stop and think about how to exit vi/vim. My point was that I built up my knowledge of the commandset by starting with the most logically primitive commands or "atoms". The ones that were obvious abbreviations like (w)rite and (q)uit were easiest to learn. Even e(x)it has this advantage, although I never developed the habit of using it because it seemed redundant, given :wq. But what does ZZ abbreviate? Another one that took a long time for me to learn was ^] which doesn't seem to have any obvious connection to the word "tag". I would have used ^T instead, and then used Shift-^T or some other control sequence to come back up the tag stack. But it is what it is. Anyway, back to the cookbook. I've had a chance to read more of it now, and I really like the way it's organized around specific tasks. The format (Problem - Solution - Discussion) reminds me of the Pattern Language book for architecture. I think the cookbook has a much-needed place in the world of vim documentation, and I want to add my thanks to the author for creating it and for making it freely available. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
