Re: [tlug] Efficient editor keystrokes [was: How to use FF's shortcuts]

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Thu, 9 Aug 2007, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

[Stuff about chords.]

> The same thing is true of uppercase and other shifted keystrokes, of
> course.  Do you have a keyboard layout that makes the most commonly
> used uppercase letters available as single keystrokes?  If not, would
> you consider using it now that I mention it?

No, and no. But I certainly consider an uppercase letter to be
two keystrokes. Typing "list this" for me is faster and much more
comfortable than typing "LIST THIS"

> Maybe that's unfair.  I don't think the repeated control characters
> should count Control as keystrokes twice.

I'll buy that.

> So accepting your accounting, Emacs costs about 50% more than vi.

Well, it's going to vary enormously, but yeah, I'd say that in general,
movement-related commands (and actions based on movement-related
commands) are something like that much more expensive in Emacs.

> As a data point, is this kind of operation often in your inner loop?

Something that is alltogether that complex is not all that frequent, but
broken down into smaller operations, yeah, I use stuff like this fairly
often.

> In general, you should *not* use position-based navigation in Emacs.
> It's much more efficient to use content-based navigation and
> mark-based navigation to get "close" to where you want to be.

Ah. I guess that's something that a lot of Emacs users don't know,
which is possibly why they look very inefficent to me (and are very
inefficient).

> Granted, most people, even those who generally are pretty efficient
> users, never make paragraphs and sexps part of their daily
> repertoire....

Wow. I use both extremely heavily, for both motion and modification.

> then M-x forward-paragraph RET will do what you want, and will also
> inform you that it's bound to "M-}, M-down, M-kp-down".

That's very cool, and a fairly typical example of how Emacs'
programmability is much better than vi's.

Oh, wait...what happened to our editor war?

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
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