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But can you repeat it in a slightly different place? That's where vim typically beats other editors for me. Every editor can do a one-off in some way. It's w
by obsurveyor 11y ago
But can you repeat it in a slightly different place? That's where vim typically beats other editors for me. Every editor can do a one-off in some way. It's when you can repeat them in different contexts or quickly adapt them to slightly different ones. vim gives you tools right up front to do this quickly and accurately instead of doing repetitive mouse gestures or filling out dialogs.
- chipotle_coyote 11y agoI'm not sure that my interpretation of this is quite what you mean; most editor operations I do day to day, at least, aren't particularly context-sensitive. The balance command in BBEdit that I referred to above, for instance, just selects whatever's in between the closest pair of braces, brackets or parens, and if you keep hitting it, it expands the selection outward. There's not much I can think of that is context-sensitive other than functions relating to the language you're editing, and I can't think of any "class A" editors -- Vim, Emacs, Sublime, TextMate, BBEdit, etc. -- that seem way below (or way above) the median in this regard. The debate about mouse-vs.-keyboard will probably be argued long after nobody's actually using either mice or keyboards. Personally I've found that the farther you need to move the cursor the more likely it is that using a pointing device for at least part of the operation will prove faster, and AFAIK most studies done on this going back 30+ years corroborate that, but it doesn't "feel" faster to us. (That's not directly relevant to editors, since Vim and Emacs both support mice just fine, even if their diehard fans consider that heretical.)