First of all I think the "^x" was a little mistake in the text, and it should just have been "x". Secondly, what you call "vi used properly" is perhaps using a macro and repeating it a certain number of times? Something like qrxjq15@r? It seems faster but it really isn't, because in the time you cooked up that macro you could also just have "used vi like notepad", probably twice -- proving the point of the text! Vim macros are nice if you have to do something for a hundred lines but not for 15. Thirdly, Plan 9 IS cool.enk wrote:I stopped reading at "^xjxjxjxjxjxjxjxjxjxjxjxjxj". If they use vi like they use notepad, of course there will be better alternatives. For example, vi used properly. And "^x" deletes the first NON-WHITESPACE char. And I used to think Plan9 was cool.
gvim, I suppose? How is this supposed to support terminal editors?enk wrote:"When the mouse is properly accelerated, many of us find that it's faster and easier to highlight the lines in question and then type and execute Edit s/^<tab>//g in acme or just type s/^<tab>//g in sam's command window."
You can do that in vim as well. Or you could just highlight the lines using the mouse and press ONE SINGLE KEY, <, to dedent. That's when I stopped reading.
For proper frame of reference, other GUI editors like Notepad++ and Textwrangler can do the same but with shift-tab, which is more intuitive. Oh, and have I mentioned that the latter editors allow you to collapse a block of code with a nice little clickable triangle in the margin, out of the box?
Yeah, I realise they don't really need to be there. I forgot to take them out when I changed from moving a line without the line break (which would be done with 0d$) to moving a line including the line break (dd). See how much thinking is involved in typing Vim commands?enk wrote:Jplus wrote:<move there by jk>0dd<move to the other line by jk>p ... <move there by jk>0yy<move to the other line by jk>p
What's with the zeroes?
Better alternatives to move a single line in Vim? Like what?enk wrote:Not that it hurts but if you don't take the time to learn basic vim, yes, there will be better alternatives.
enk wrote:What exactly does grep offer that vim regex doesn't?
Oh, I don't remember and I don't find it important enough to figure it out. In any case, I've come to use TextWrangler searches for everything I used macros for in Vim, as well as everything I used pattern searches for in Vim, and both use cases have become more convenient.