Re: Hard to switch from vi

[don provan <dprovan@comcast.net>]

Wen Weng <WenWeng@charter.net> writes:

> ken wrote:
>> First, I don't know of any comparison of the number of keystrokes.
> Well, that's just my experience so far after one week of using emacs.

Could you elaborate? I can't think of any serious inefficiencies in
emacs vs. vi, so I'm wondering if something else is going on. Perhaps
you're mentally ascribing two key strokes to control-f because you
have to push two keys and you aren't used to that, or possibly maybe
the issue is that you're familiar the vi "big commands" but, being a
emacs learner, not the emacs ones, so in emacs you have to do
everything in small steps that in vi you can do with single commands.
Anyway, if you could explain, maybe we could see why your experience
doesn't jive with ours.

There's no doubt that the two editors involve entirely different
approaches to editing, but I think emacs starts getting interesting
when you get past editing and start using the rest of the emacs
system.

>> Secondly, other things are much more important.
> Actually, the number of keystrokes is number one importance to me and
> to a lot of people, I guess.

Well, I actually agree with others that there are many more important
issues, but the one that drives me crazy about vi actually winds up
causing more keystrokes in vi: the modalism. It seems like every vi
session I end up spending the majority of keystrokes cleaning up text
executed as commands because I thought I was in text-enter mode or
commands entered as text because I thought I was in command-mode. Now,
of course, this is in large measure because of me and my inexperience
with vi, but I still consider it a fundamental problem that vi forces
me to be in sync with its idea of what mode we are in.

-don