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Raskin had a shot at building an editor along these lines but died too soon. His attempt to remove the pain of vi-style modes was by having users hold keys down
by cturner 12y ago
Raskin had a shot at building an editor along these lines but died too soon. His attempt to remove the pain of vi-style modes was by having users hold keys down to get the modal effects. As soon as you release, you're back in command mode. There's a problem with this for frequent interaction: holding down keys contributes to rsi.
A common path to fluency with vi is to live in command mode. When you type something, immediately press escape out of habit. When you want to type something new, develop a habit of pressing a/i/o with confidence that you're already in cmd mode.
If you find yourself navigating in insert mode, that's a red flag.
- agumonkey 12y agoAbout RSI, I believe chorded keybindings can alleviate it. And I've seen some nice vi configs where 'jj' == escape, so you're easily back to command mode. Cute idea.
- cturner 12y agoWow. That jj idea is a good one. I've been down a similar path to that for other purposes. I changed my leader key to space, and now I can save with <leader>w instead of having to do shift to get :w. But I hadn't thought of making escape more convenient. That's an excellent idea.
- agumonkey 12y agoI also took a moment to appreciate the full beauty of that trick the first time I saw it. And I'm an Emacs user.