Joachim Schrod wrote:
OK, I'll bite. You wanted it, you get it... ;-) :-)
I know vi -- both the original and vim -- better than almost any hard-core vi fans that I ever met. Actually, those who know vi better than I do, are no vi `fans' but proficient vi users who knows the deficiencies of their tool and are therefore no fans any more.
You are speaking of 'vi' -- not 'vim/gvim'. There is an active and motivated vim/gvim userbase with it supporting many user written plug-ins. Your information appears to be from about 21-25 years ago when 'vi' was only a curses interface on top of 'ed', and when emacs first came out.
Btw, tongue-in-cheek, I don't know what you mean with `multi-key sequences', the days of Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift are long gone; nowadays one uses the mouse
The purpose of 'vi' bindings was to allow those who had grown up having to take typing courses to edit efficiently. Taking your fingers off of home row to move to function keys, and especially, mice, has been shown to slow down most simple editing jobs. There are jobs for mouse and func-key -augmented GUI's -- but simple text entry/editing is made slower.
Or, from my personal experience: You obviously haven't been in many troubleshooting environments where one has a Windoze system without putty, and some suits breezing down your neck that you shall solve the problem with the multi-million Euro Unix system that doesn't run properly since 4 weeks and where they tried to solve the problems with their outsourced Indian provider and didn't succed? Lucky you.
Putty? Glue? I'd BMO util disk including Gvim among others. You go to customer sites and DON'T have your own personal SW CD/DVD/USB-frob with all your own debugging tools loaded onto it? You are right. I don't usually go to customers sites so ill prepared. If I did, first thing I'd do is start downloading SW. They don't like me running my own SW -- then we have a problem. I wouldn't trust any 'random', 'generic' sw they might provide. Who knows what problems it may have. Their problems could be buried in their own libraries and utils -- and you would use their utils to debug such a problem? Maybe you want to rethink your support strategy. With Gvim, I have access to most modern scripting languages (perl, python, tcl, ruby -- even LISP) to augment the tool if I as well as complete syntax files for 100's of file formats. And emacs comes with ...what? Oh yeah, a requirement for a META key I don't have. But whatever works for you...and peace and though you make walk in the valley of windows, may you be spared from evil blue screens and the hidden, unspeakable DRM tactics of the trickster who tempts us toward evil... (just throwing in a bit of religious stuff to keep this talk in perspective! :-) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org