i've been playing with vim more lately and thinking hard about the different approaches that emacs and vi take to editing.
my conclusion is that vi's modal interface is generally a good thing. having one mode where you are editing text and another where you can enter commands is a very powerful way of doing things. what i don't like is that vi considers moving the cursor to be a command rather than an inherent part of edit mode. sure, you can use the arrow keys while in insert mode, but anything that makes me move my fingers that far off the home row just feels inefficient and clumsy.
vimacs seems to neatly solve this problem for me, making vi's insert mode actually usable without constant mode switching or resorting to arrow keys.
i've already mostly switched to vim for simple editing of text files and email. i can't seem to make it not suck for perl and python editing though, so i'm still using emacs for real programming. (and James Clark's nXML mode makes emacs the nicest environment for editing XML/HTML that i could possibly imagine.)
comments
anders pearson - Wed 05 Nov 2003 15:44:59
i've been playing with vim more lately and thinking hard about the different approaches that emacs and vi take to editing.
my conclusion is that vi's modal interface is generally a good thing. having one mode where you are editing text and another where you can enter commands is a very powerful way of doing things. what i don't like is that vi considers moving the cursor to be a command rather than an inherent part of edit mode. sure, you can use the arrow keys while in insert mode, but anything that makes me move my fingers that far off the home row just feels inefficient and clumsy.
vimacs seems to neatly solve this problem for me, making vi's insert mode actually usable without constant mode switching or resorting to arrow keys.
i've already mostly switched to vim for simple editing of text files and email. i can't seem to make it not suck for perl and python editing though, so i'm still using emacs for real programming. (and James Clark's nXML mode makes emacs the nicest environment for editing XML/HTML that i could possibly imagine.)