Damn, I typed a big long thing, then hit the wrong key combo and zapped it all. Is that irony?
Anyway, the gist of what I wanted to say is that when you use vim, you do a lot of thinking about how you're going to position the cursor or exactly how you're going to do a visual selection of some chunk of text. When you use something like Acme that's mouse oriented, you mostly use the keyboard to enter text, while the mouse is used to point and select text. Changing the cursor is a visual, spatial thing, as is selecting text; the mouse is ideal for this, being a two-DOF system, while the keyboard is a discrete/linear tool.
I'm a huge fan of Acme for most of my editing, but I like vi for quick stuff, plus there's a certain charm to firing up my old VT-220 or ADM-3 and hacking away. However, when I see somebody trying to do serious editing in vim, flailing away madly to move the cursor to the right place and do that funky funky visual selection thing, I get impatient and a bit ticked; he feels busy because he's slamming all these keys, but I just keep wondering what the hell is taking so long.
Vimperator and this new Chrome extension have a good idea in providing keyboard shortcuts that are both extremely brief (one keystroke, no need for Ctrl combos) and pretty familiar to people who use vi. However, people should be mindful of the best uses of all their input devices, not merely the keyboard (which is certainly more 1337, but not always the best choice).
I actually take the opposite view. When I'm selecting text or placing a cursor, there's a discrete location between two letters I want to hit, and it can be annoying having to aim at it with a mouse and possibly miss. It also seems that vim is somewhat faster for me, though I've never measured it. Vim is definitely better for micro-scale cursor positioning--down a line or over a word or two.
Anyway, the gist of what I wanted to say is that when you use vim, you do a lot of thinking about how you're going to position the cursor or exactly how you're going to do a visual selection of some chunk of text. When you use something like Acme that's mouse oriented, you mostly use the keyboard to enter text, while the mouse is used to point and select text. Changing the cursor is a visual, spatial thing, as is selecting text; the mouse is ideal for this, being a two-DOF system, while the keyboard is a discrete/linear tool.
I'm a huge fan of Acme for most of my editing, but I like vi for quick stuff, plus there's a certain charm to firing up my old VT-220 or ADM-3 and hacking away. However, when I see somebody trying to do serious editing in vim, flailing away madly to move the cursor to the right place and do that funky funky visual selection thing, I get impatient and a bit ticked; he feels busy because he's slamming all these keys, but I just keep wondering what the hell is taking so long.
Vimperator and this new Chrome extension have a good idea in providing keyboard shortcuts that are both extremely brief (one keystroke, no need for Ctrl combos) and pretty familiar to people who use vi. However, people should be mindful of the best uses of all their input devices, not merely the keyboard (which is certainly more 1337, but not always the best choice).