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Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#181

Post by zanellato19 »

mckinney wrote: post #180

Ok, I get that vi is a legend etc. I think I understand why, but I'll keep that to myself. But honestly, it's a relic. Hell, it was a relic in the late 80s when I was in college! Few of my classmates bothered with it unless they HAD to use it, which in my view is what makes vi so sticky. We can thank the academic community for perpetuating it as some kind of "expert" tool and encouraging or even requiring students to…

But it is an expert tool. Does that mean that a GUI editor isn't? Not at all. But I don't expect my non-programmers friends to use vi/vim (or any person, really), but its definetely something that proves its worth to programmers more than to other people. The elitist attitude is terrible, I agree, and people should use it for whatever they want, but to deny that it is an expert's tool is wrong, imo.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#182

Post by zanellato19 »

skohan wrote: post #31
narrator wrote: post #10

It's amazing how fast one can edit text with vi once you get all the keys down. There used to be a video game that taught how to use VI. Is it still around?

Some things seem unnecessarily unintuitive to me about the shortcuts. For instance, using 4 in-line keys for navigating a 2D space seems like a wasted opportunity. Every video game ever came to the conclusion that the inverse-T layout is ideal for this task.

Just don't use h and l, really. There are a lot of ways to travel horizontally in vim. The fact that up/down are besides each other is really awesome, since that is the movement you will be doing most of the time.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#183

Post by zanellato19 »

umvi wrote: post #26
narrator wrote: post #10

It's amazing how fast one can edit text with vi once you get all the keys down. There used to be a video game that taught how to use VI. Is it still around?

> It's amazing how fast one can edit text with vi once you get all the keys down People say this, but I feel the same about VSCode. Once you know a few shortcuts (esp. the multi-select and multi-cursor shortcuts), you can make incredibly powerful bulk changes to a file. I wish there were a subreddit called "TextEditorWars" or something where a challenge is given, and you can submit a screen capture of you accomplishi…

Checkout vim golf if you are curious about its possibilities.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#184

Post by lenkite »

tgb wrote: post #77
pletnes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use relative line numbers, 5dd makes total sense.

I tried this for a while but it never clicked for me. I prefer using semantically-meaningful groupings like paragraphs or parentheses, it just seems nicer. And relative line numbers wouldn't make, say, 5dw any easier to count.

You can use: df to delete forward (including char), dt to delete forward until char. (excluding char) d/ to delete until search pattern is found

In case you wish to type immediately after deleting, replace 'd' with 'c' in the above.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#185

Post by fsckboy »

saagarjha wrote: post #45
skohan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things seem unnecessarily unintuitive to me about the shortcuts. For instance, using 4 in-line keys for navigating a 2D space seems like a wasted opportunity. Every video game ever came to the conclusion that the inverse-T layout is ideal for this task.

I mean, putting all they keys in the home row is admirable but the up/down placement seems so counter-intuitive! Almost everywhere I see arrow keys put in a line up comes first…

^H in ASCII is backspace (move carriage to the left), and ^J is linefeed (move carriage down), so h-j were completely intuitive to people who already knew ASCII (i.e. everybody) and then it just makes sense to continue the row of other cursor movements.

"intuitive" doesn't mean "I was born knowing it"

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#186

Post by p_l »

JJMcJ wrote: post #125
smabie wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally think that the Berkeley socket api is really really ugly. Plan9's networking api is very nice, though: https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man3/dial.html

The man page in the link has further links to source code. Seems like the API is built on top of sockets, which is not a bad idea. I certainly agree that sockets can get tedious.

the plan9 port API is based on sockets, yes - because plan9port is a port of plan9 runtime to other OSes.

However, BSD Sockets are bad API, and can be argued to be one of the reasons, if not major reason, behind many issues in IP-based networks, including slow IPv6 rollout.

They also were a rushed port/rewrite of existing TCP/IP code done essentially by grad students on a grant from DoD because vendor (DEC) told DoD that they are not getting any new models of the computer they used primarily for TPC/IP.

Part of the requirements was that the resulting code is shared so that vendors could quickly provide support for TCP/IP in various products.

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