On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 6:37 AM, Anthony Campbell <[email protected]> wrote: > On 08 Nov 2012, Ed Kostas wrote: > > [snip] > >> In the world at large, besides the engineer, there are creative >> writers who seldom move the cursor, or even erase characters, or make >> corrections. These people just type forward. > > > I find the thought of creative [sic] writers who "almost never make > corrections" deeply depressing although perfectly believable in the > light of the sloppy verbose writing I encounter these days, even in > books from well-known publishers.
That might be the least charitable way of interpreting the original comments. I took it to mean that writers of prose tend to "write forward" a lot more often and for longer durations than, perhaps, programmers do. But not necessarily that this is the *only* way in which they work. I write almost nothing but prose (using Markdown). Vim works quite well for that. But I do understand, particularly when drafting, that the bouncing between insert and normal modes adds a bit of friction. It took me a long time to switch from Emacs because at the drafting stage it remained more efficient than Vim. In terms of pure speed while drafting, a non-modal editor is probably technically more efficient in some ways, but overall it's a win. I'm still working on methods to make that stage of my writing process more efficient. I absolutely understand the desire to make normal mode more suited to that particular way of working (recognizing that there are, hopefully, further editing stages involved :) It has helped me to consider Vim a text processing engine rather than an editor. c -- Chris Lott <[email protected]> -- You received this message from the "vim_use" 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
