71–80 of 227 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because you don't have to hit escape or jj to exit out. You just let your foot off the pedal. No chance of accidentally being in edit mode or not.
I doubt that foot / finger coordination is good enough to get the timing right without losing some keystrokes.
We discussed that yesterday at work, but decided that it will be more useful in Emacs than in Vim. :)
This is brilliant! I only use i part of the time, however; I, a, A, o, and O are each used substantially.
Thought this myself... BUT it could work with three pedals (i, a and o) with the shift key. Brilliant idea though, I would pay up to $50 for one of these.
The one I do have a massive problem with is capslock. So many times I'll go back to normal mode and there's a few moments of disorientation before I realise all my commands are being capitalised. Ugh.
Interesting idea, I wonder about using it for the Ctrl key instead. I switched to vim some time ago and that's the bit I find most clumsy, especially given the placement on a Mac. I've remapped caps lock to Ctrl, which helps.
Just out of interest, how often are you really using the ctrl key in a Vim session? My CapsLock is mapped to ESC, which I hit at the end of every edit (so several times per minute), but I don't think I use ctrl much at all. OTOH I have heard Emacs users need Ctrl/Alt constantly while editing.
We discussed that yesterday at work, but decided that it will be more useful in Emacs than in Vim. :)
How would you use it with Emacs?
I love how the "excellent" VIM editor would benefit immensely from a hardware peripheral. Definitely a neat hacky idea (so by its nature, me gusta), but VIM is a silly, silly editor for real world purposes.
Why do you think that? Vim is perfectly fine for real world purposes - I use it for real world purposes all the time, as do a lot of other people.
Not only do the basic vi commands make my life easier (My mantra is if I have to press the same key more than three times, then I'm doing it wrong - you quickly learn to navigate by words, brackets, lines, search and judge how many of these away you want to move - eg instead of wwwww to move forward five words you can do 5w, to turn "abcde_" into "_abcdeabcdeabcde" you can do 5x3p - silly examples I know, but this makes it very fast an efficient to navigate and edit text), but with vims additional features and with a small handful of plugins there is nothing that a GUI IDE can do that vim can't.
Interesting idea, I wonder about using it for the Ctrl key instead. I switched to vim some time ago and that's the bit I find most clumsy, especially given the placement on a Mac. I've remapped caps lock to Ctrl, which helps.
Just out of interest, how often are you really using the ctrl key in a Vim session? My CapsLock is mapped to ESC, which I hit at the end of every edit (so several times per minute), but I don't think I use ctrl much at all. OTOH I have heard Emacs users need Ctrl/Alt constantly while editing.
Actually, on the laptop I'm on, I have Caps Lock mapped to backspace - vanilla unedited colemak layout. On my desktop, I have Caps Lock remapped to LCtrl and LCrtrl mapped to backspace.
> Has anyone thought of this before? The 1992 paper "The Prevention of Mode Errors Through Sensory Feedback" [1] uses this exact mechanism. [1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/asellen/public... I've argued for years that vim is one of the few good examples of modal design since it allows for quick entry of the command grammar without modifiers and the command grammar is an excellent fit for the domain.…
Doug Engelbart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart) around 50 years ago:
http://www.dougengelbart.org/history/pix.html
"other experimental variations were later built and tested, including foot-pedal operated, knee-operated, even head-operated ("nose pointing") devices."