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> There's a difference between "more efficient" and "easier to learn". You're advocating the latter. This is not a good thing. You've posed a false dichotomy.
by lutusp 14y ago
> There's a difference between "more efficient" and "easier to learn". You're advocating the latter. This is not a good thing.
You've posed a false dichotomy. Modern editors are both more efficient and easier to learn.
> Ideally, you want to move around faster with less context switching. Keyboard-oriented editors like Vim and Emacs are much better at this than any other editor I've seen, as long as you learned how to use them properly.
Pico is a keyboard-only editor, and it's easier to navigate, and to use in general. So is every other editor that exists, written after about 1980. None of them require the user to switch modes, an idea that died with vi -- I mean, if only vi had died.
As soon as keyboards included arrow keys, the handwriting was on the wall.
- nsmartt 14y agoHow is a mouse more efficient than an ability to move to a phrase with a bit of typing, skip words ahead with a single letter instead of ctrl + shift, move to a new line and a specific place on that line with a couple of button presses, etc?
- lutusp 14y ago> How is a mouse more efficient than an ability to move to a phrase with a bit of typing, skip words ahead with a single letter instead of ctrl + shift, move to a new line and a specific place on that line with a couple of button presses, etc? I can't improve on your explanation as the answer to your own question. Obviously using a mouse to cut/copy and paste, within the same document or between independent documents, is more efficient than what you just described.
- nsmartt 14y agoMoving my hand over to the mouse, moving the mouse cursor to wherever I need, selecting that text and dragging while my editor slowly scrolls with my cursor when I could use a few key sequences with no context switch is the opposite of efficient. edit: wording
- lutusp 14y agoPro tip: don't downvote a correspondent from whom you also expect a reply.
- nsmartt 14y agoIf you check my profile, you'll see that I have less than 500 karma and therefore could not have downvoted you. edit: wording/lower verbosity edit: typo
- snogglethorpe 14y agoAlso HN doesn't allow downvoting of direct replies...
- snogglethorpe 14y ago> Obviously using a mouse to cut/copy and paste, within the same document or between independent documents, is more efficient than what you just described. You may personally believe this strongly, but it's most certainly not "obvious"... In reality, as is usually the case, it depends very much on the details of what's being done. Some cases are faster with a mouse, others with well-designed keyboard commands. [Which is why good editors support both styles of interaction...]
- marssaxman 14y agoVi people look at me like I have a mental disability when I say this, but I've written tens of thousands of lines of code in pico; it is a completely serviceable programmer's editor.