On 02/17/2011 01:43 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Hi,
first of all: My interest and/or question, which let me post here, is
neither intended as the initial spark for a flame war nor as anything
_against_ someone or something. May be it is a kind of "exploring the
psychology of the vim human". And: English isn't my mothers tongue --
anything sounding harsh, badly or negatively results only from this --
it is by far NOT my intention!
The start of all this was the observation, that there are many
editors out there, which are rated differently and often on a
scale from totally bad to fantastic. Every kind of review result
seems to exist.
But with vim it seems (at least to me) a little different: Either
you hate it or you love it and will not touch anything else your whole
life long (I am exeggerating only a _little_ bit ;) )
The reason for this observation -- the polarization into mainly two groups
of people -- seems not only based on the properties of vim alone.
I think (read: "I dont know for sure...") that there is a certain kind
of perception of text and/or handling of text by vim people, which
matches perfextly the way of text usage and presentation by vim itsself.
May be I am totally wrong here -- so please understand this as a
big question mark ... I am just only driven by curiosity.
Is there a certain perception of text and text handling by vim people
which may be distintive different from people who definetly dont like
vim?
And again: May question does not indent to judge over "the better way
of the perception of text" !!!
Is there a kind of vim psychology??? ;)
I am interested in answers as I am interested in questions... :)
Best regards,
mcc
For me, initially it was the observation that if you have
a series of editing commands to do, it's very inefficient
to have only a single mode. In other words, let's suppose you
it's 15 editing commands to be done in a row:
modal editor: <esc> 15 keystrokes or so <back to insert mode>
non-modal (but powerful) editor like emacs: 15 keystrokes +
15 "escapes" like ctrl-x or whatever.
Therefore, you spend nearly twice the work to do the same
task, whenever you can combine many editing commands in
a row.
In effect, what happens is that in a non-modal editor you
end up working in a more inefficient way because "smarter"
combinations of commands are too complex/verbose. Go to
the open bracket in current line? In vim I'll do f(, in
a non-modal editor I'll most likely just hold arrow key
until I get there.
More commands means you can stay on homerow
for all editing tasks.
In the end, it's a question of initial investment of
learning time for a payoff of efficiency in the future.
If I'm a warehouse manager and I spend 5 minutes a day
typing, it would be bizarre to learn vim (except as
a fun / hobby project). If I'm a writer or a programmer
and I edit for hours every day, it'd be equally bizarre
not to learn a modal editor.
-Rainyday
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