Mastering Vim in Vim • Hacker News Board

Re: Mastering Vim in Vim

#31

Post by reirob » Fri, Jan 24, 2014, 10:30 AM UTC

X4 wrote: post #23

Most of the commands are suited for a en_US keyboard only, do you know a .vimrc that is optimized for a de_DE keyboard?

I learned en_US and tossed the other keyboard layouts that I had to learn before (German qwertz and later French azerty).

It was really worth it! It was difficult for 3 weeks. On Linux I use the US International AltGr Dead Keys layout, which I find very suitable because it allows me to write all the German, French and Turkish characters by composing accents on them. On Windows this layout does not exist (but the simple US which is backward compatible for all ASCII characters is there) so I had to find it on the net and install it manually.

The rational is, that in almost all non-English countries the US keyboard layout is available and you can really quickly change to it (on windows it is LeftShift+LeftAlt) if you have to touch the keyboards of your colleagues. The pre-requisite is to be able to type blindly.

I took this decision when I had to work in different countries. It was a life changing experience. If I knew it before I would never have learned azerty when I moved to France.

One problem though is to get computers with the US layout. In this regards Lenovo seems to be the only one that lets you chose the US layout.

Re: Mastering Vim in Vim

#32

Post by holyjaw » Fri, Jan 24, 2014, 4:08 PM UTC

X4 wrote: post #23

Most of the commands are suited for a en_US keyboard only, do you know a .vimrc that is optimized for a de_DE keyboard?

Id say the layout of the keyboard doesn't matter. I've been using vim in Dvorak for years now and it hasn't been an issue. The 'hjkl' thing doesn't make sense, but once you get past that, it's just another set of keys to learn.

Re: Mastering Vim in Vim

#33

Post by pydave » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 1:45 AM UTC

scelerat wrote: post #22

Are there any other modal text editors in wide use? All others I can think of have you strongly in one mode (insertion, typing) and you only drop out of it if you hold down a command key (Control, or pull down a menu, etc.). Before GUIs it was a lot more common to have 'entry mode' and command mode in your text editor/word processor, but vim is the only one I know of now where 'insert' is merely one mode, and by defa…

emacs + evil?

Aside from vi-emulation, I haven't seen many editors that heavily use modal editing.

Re: Mastering Vim in Vim

#34

Post by X4 » Mon, Jan 27, 2014, 11:07 PM UTC

b3n wrote: post #30

X4 wrote: post #23

Most of the commands are suited for a en_US keyboard only, do you know a .vimrc that is optimized for a de_DE keyboard?

Which commands are you having trouble with? I'm using the Colemak keyboard layout and have no problems.

[ ] { } and / are harder to reach on de_DE than on en_US. I once learned the en_US layout, but after that I had problems with de_DE and when I visited Paris, I also had trouble with fr_FR, altouhgh I knew azerty and qwertz quite well.

I have never ever heard about Colemak. I use Gentoo with the KDE destop, btw.