Re: [tlug] How to use FF's shortcuts [C&C?]

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Wed, 8 Aug 2007, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Curt Sampson writes:
>
> > (Generally, the navigation in vi is much more efficient than Emacs,
>
> More, quite possible (although the viper emulation mode is pretty good,
> which might wipe out that advantage entirely ;-)

It has one serious failure which drove me up the wall: it puts the
cursor on characters that don't exist. Specifically, the non-existent
character after the last character of the line.

It's quite possibly rather too bad that that particular thing put me off
so badly, because it seems to me (not having used either extensively),
that Emacs' LISP-like thing, bastardized as it is, is far superior to
anything that any version of vi has to offer. (Disclaimer: I do not
intend this statement to avert editor wars, and it should not be taken
as such. :-))

Moving slightly out of order here:

> Of course 8 of them are chords, which is hard on the tendons.

Chords, to me, and many others, count as as many keystrokes are in the
chord. Let me justify it this way, and see if you agree:

First, I think it's not a true chord, as in one you'd play on a piano,
since the order in which you press the keys is important. If on a piano
I play the E fractionally before the C in a C major chord, it sounds
pretty much the same. Yet, in Emacs, it means something completely
different. Second, a chord seems to me harder in that I now have to
co-ordinate the lifting off a finger from the key, as well as the
press, giving me two motions to deal with instead of one; in a gross
oversimplification, it's no longer stacatto. (It's not uncommon to
define stacatto as, "play the note for two thirds of its value.")

> > as far as I've seen. Something like "move to the space before third
> > instance of the word 'foo' ahead of the cursor and replace the rest
> > of the the paragraph with a period seems to me a heck of a lot fewer
> > keystrokes than most editors.)
>
> I am curious how many keystrokes a skilled vi user can get that down to.
>
> In Emacs, that's
>
> C-s foo C-s C-s M-b C-b C-SPC M-} C-w .
>  1   4   5   6   7   8     9  10  11 12

Or, if you count chords the way I (and many others!) do, ignoring having
to time the lift, and just looking at keypresses:

  1 2  5  6 7 8 9 a b c d e f  10 11 12 13

(Converting from hex to decimal, 19 keystrokes. [Hex let me line this up
better.])

In vi, where the last E is an escape:

    3/foo/-1c}.E

or 13 keystrokes (remember the shift for the '}').

Of course, you also need to consider what kind of reach you need for the
keystrokes, and the right-left balance, and anyway it's always possible
to find better and worse examples of common situations in which to
compare editors.

In general, watching what appear to me to be good Emacs users, I find
them banging on or holding down arrow keys and the like quite a lot more
than I do.

Then again, for most users, the whole point may be moot. My friend Perry
Metzger once claimed to me that you will never become a good Emacs user
if you didn't learn it before you were fifteen, and I can believe the
same of vi.

It would be an interesting, if painful, experiment for me to learn to
use Emacs efficiently. It's not likely to happen because what expert
Emacs user is likely to want to stand around behind me for several weeks
answering questions such as, "how do I move to the space before third
instance of the word 'foo' ahead of the cursor and replace the rest of
the the paragraph with a period?"

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com