Re: [gtk-list] Re: vi bindings for text widgets

[Michal Vitecek <M Vitecek sh cvut cz>]

> > On Fri, 3 Jul 1998, matt wrote:
> > > what is the possiblity of someone hacking in
> > > vi bindings into the text and text entry widgets?
> > >
> 
> Shevek replied:
> > Yes please. I think this would be a very good idea, maybe an input mode
> > like bash has for readline.
> > 
> 
> Please, no!
> Why can we never break with the past and move forwards? Vi and Emacs and
> other such things were fine in their time, i.e the late 1970's and early
> 1980's when the "glass-TTY" with programmable cursor-control was the latest
> thing to have, and the lack of anything much more than an alphanumeric
> keyboard forced the use of weird mode-switching and strange ctrl-meta key
> sequences in order to implement a screen editor at all.
> 
> But now we're in the late 1990's! We've got decent keyboards. We've got
> mice. We've got X.

 what i really hate on X and various X widgets on linux is the fact that
 one can't do almost anything without mouse. and i hate to use mouse,
 because it slows down my typing and all. i'd go nuts if i had to take my
 mouse in my hand, move some screens away, select the line i want to copy,
 put it in the buffer, move back and paste it. with vim i can do it quite
 easily: i type only the beginning of the line and press <C-X> and <C-L>
 and the whole line matching the beginning is pasted here. now tell me,
 what's faster?

> 
> Time to forget Vi and Emacs and move to Nedit, gedit and other modern editors!

 i think that u won't be able to do so many things with those "modern"
 editors just because they're too user friendly and therefore demanding u
 to click here, there and everywhere. and i don't think i have to tell u
 how many functions vi or emacs really have. the problem is to spend some
 hours practising and learning - that's the disadvantage.

> I consider that Vi-like support for readline was a serious mistake. It
> means that you can't just lean over a colleage's shoulder and type a couple
> of commands on his/her terminal (this happened to me a couple of weeks
> ago). Why isn't there any mouse support for readline?

 mouse support for readline would be disaster - u give too much power to
 mouse.

> 
>                            ----------------------
> 
> BTW, before anyone tells me off, I started with 'ed' in 1978. I was one of
> those who migrated to the wizzo new glass-TTY technology and Vi when I
> got the chance in the early 1980's. I kept to a Vi clone when I spent 6
> years in the DOS wilderness 1988-1994. Then I got linux and X and moved
> over to Nedit.

 looks like u had vi but never learnt how to use it. i switched from all
 those user-friendly features-missing editors to vi and i really am glad i
 did so - i have much better efficiency at programming now.

> 
> I'm overjoyed to have finally escaped from Vi, just as I was happy to lose
> 'ed' all those years ago. Doesn't anyone else want to move with the times, or
> am I some sort of techo-mobile weirdo?

 i don't want to move to the times when all my work would be slowed down
 by overuse of mouse and my computer would be almost unusable when my
 mouse got broken. mouse is fine, but keyboard is much faster if the
 support for it is done cleverly.

> 
> Rude answers to that last question to /dev/null please!
> 
> --
> 
> Steve                                       | Steve's law of House Rewiring:
> S.Hosgood@swansea.ac.uk                     | "No matter how many power sockets
> Phone: +44 1792 297292 + ask for Steve      |  you fit in a room, you will run
> Fax:   +44 1792 295811                      |  out within the first week of use
> --------------------------------------------+  even if you took Steve's law of
> http://iiit.swan.ac.uk/~iisteve/steve.html  |  House Rewiring into account"
> 
> 
> -- 
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> 
> 

			fuf


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