On 13.05.13 10:05, Asis Hallab wrote:
> I have been facing the very same problem. For me Vim is about doing
> the job of text editing efficiently. So getting to the place you want
> to edit should be fast and easy. In spite of all the different
> available movement commands I frequently find myself thinking, that in
> a particular situation I might had gotten to the place I want to edit
> faster using the mouse. After all searching or jumping to a a line
> number easily require four to five key strokes.
Yes, searching, e.g. /Gob to go to "Goblin", many lines away, can work,
but you have to whack 'n' if the search finds another before the one
you're after.
For me, a long-time non-expert user, it is convenient to use H,M, or L
to instantly reach the approximate page portion of interest¹. A quick
visual guesstimate, and a 7+ or 5- gets close enough for an up/down
arrow to bring me to the target line. To reach the desired word, I
prefer to use 7W or 6B, because the eye does not readily estimate minor
word components. Using 0/^ or $ first, allows word count estimation
from the nearest end of the line, giving more frequent first-guess hits.
If the brain is tiring, then a few Ws are quick to peck out, rather than
guess counts, and work especially well with long Words, e.g. pathnames.
Oh, and I find ge, to go to the end of the previous word to be not as
quick, especially after a few b/B, as one extra b/B, followed by an e/E.
Resorting to the mouse would definitely be slower.
When working with paragraphs, such as this post, my fingers
automatically resort to } and {, since H,M, and L would take me out of
the couple of paragraphs being hammered into shape at any moment. Within
the paragraphs, '(' and ')' can be a quick way around. It is faster to
hit the same key 3 times, rather than 3 separate keys, or find the
mouse.
One thing which works for me is to have vim exit insert mode on up/down
arrow, but not l/r. (Yup, I have no use for that jkl and whatever
nonsense - because I'll never be a touch typist, despite nearly three
decades as a programmer.)
But it doesn't all have to be fast. When thinking about how the next
paragraph should start, just plodding back down after an intra-paragraph
edit, with down-arrows, reduces the wetware processing load, possibly
making for better content.
Going back to review this before posting, I'm reminded that Page-Up and
Page-Down work fine in vim. Or ^b and ^f, if you haven't remapped them.
(I'm experimenting with using ^b for ":bu ", to save keystrokes when I'm
working with thirty or forty buffers open, and zapping between them
several times per minute.)
This isn't quite motion, but ^d in insert mode undoes one tab of indent.
That can reasonably often save a few keystrokes, if autoindent is on, as
when hacking a bit of code.
But there's sure to be an FAQ or tutorial on the topic on the vim site
somewhere, I'd guess.
Erik
¹ I have set scrolloff=3, so H and L do not go to the page extremes.
That means it's not quite so far to the target line, allowing a better
guess for the line jump.
And ^o is the quickest and surest way back to my second paragraph,
after adding this footnote, while G{ took me here from there, across
40 lines, in two keystrokes. (The { is to come back before the sig.)
--
Maybe there should be more of this worldwide?:
"Our milk's the closest thing that you can get to putting your jug in the vat,"
Pyengana's Jon Healey, commenting on the growing trend of farmer-marketed milk,
in response to the unsustainable $1/L retailing of milk by big multinationals.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-10/price-war-drives-demand-for-farmhouse-milk/4681996
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