4 ms·

This article is excellent. I'm an emacs user, and I know of several articles and books that introduce emacs, but this is the first time that I've ever actually

This article is excellent. I'm an emacs user, and I know of several articles and books that introduce emacs, but this is the first time that I've ever actually understood how a vi master thinks.

whacked_new 19y ago
Wow, the '.' is certainly an enviable feature. http://meghnad.iucaa.ernet.in/intranet/sysadm/help_desk/emacs/49.html http://meghnad.iucaa.ernet.in/intranet/sysadm/help_desk/emac... isn't reassuring either. How does C-x (, C-x ), and C-x e compare? http://linuxgazette.net/issue47/pedersen.html http://linuxgazette.net/issue47/pedersen.html
- apathy 19y ago
  Esc-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift ;-) I started out in Emacs, made the leap to XEmacs, learned to write elisp, then one day I discovered that Vim syntax highlighting was pretty damn good too... it was all over. Vim + Screen == Real Ultimate Power
- mechanical_fish 19y ago
  The emacs macro features compare pretty well. They're a killer feature of emacs. The editor is named after macros, after all. You can probably accomplish much of what vi's "." does using emacs macros. The trick is that in emacs you have to notice the opportunity slightly in advance, so that you can hit 'C-x (' and then plan out your macro so that it plays back well on subsequent invocations. You could probably train yourself to think of that more often, after which your emacs experience might be roughly similar to that of the vi user. But I suspect that vi is better designed for such a macro-intensive style of editing. The beauty of "." appears to be that vi workflow naturally divides into little chunks of action, each of which can then be treated post facto as a macro. This explains my #1 pet peeve as a completely ignorant vi user -- that vi is so damned choppy, always switching in and out of insert mode. That's not a bug, it's a feature! Those little transitions are the waypoints that will later be used to break your workstream into repeatable chunks.
apathy 19y ago
Plus it's a brilliant ad for his product. Basically, "here's why I wrote this product, once you get hooked on Vim, come back and I'll sell it to you for your day-to-day work." Genius! This is what Hacker News is all about, conversion rate :-)

This article is excellent. I'm an emacs user, and I know of several articles and books that introduce emacs, but this is the first time that I've ever actually understood how a vi master thinks.

whacked_new 19y ago

Wow, the '.' is certainly an enviable feature. http://meghnad.iucaa.ernet.in/intranet/sysadm/help_desk/emacs/49.html http://meghnad.iucaa.ernet.in/intranet/sysadm/help_desk/emac... isn't reassuring either. How does C-x (, C-x ), and C-x e compare? http://linuxgazette.net/issue47/pedersen.html http://linuxgazette.net/issue47/pedersen.html

apathy 19y ago
Esc-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift ;-) I started out in Emacs, made the leap to XEmacs, learned to write elisp, then one day I discovered that Vim syntax highlighting was pretty damn good too... it was all over. Vim + Screen == Real Ultimate Power
mechanical_fish 19y ago
The emacs macro features compare pretty well. They're a killer feature of emacs. The editor is named after macros, after all. You can probably accomplish much of what vi's "." does using emacs macros. The trick is that in emacs you have to notice the opportunity slightly in advance, so that you can hit 'C-x (' and then plan out your macro so that it plays back well on subsequent invocations. You could probably train yourself to think of that more often, after which your emacs experience might be roughly similar to that of the vi user. But I suspect that vi is better designed for such a macro-intensive style of editing. The beauty of "." appears to be that vi workflow naturally divides into little chunks of action, each of which can then be treated post facto as a macro. This explains my #1 pet peeve as a completely ignorant vi user -- that vi is so damned choppy, always switching in and out of insert mode. That's not a bug, it's a feature! Those little transitions are the waypoints that will later be used to break your workstream into repeatable chunks.

apathy 19y ago

Plus it's a brilliant ad for his product. Basically, "here's why I wrote this product, once you get hooked on Vim, come back and I'll sell it to you for your day-to-day work." Genius! This is what Hacker News is all about, conversion rate :-)