On Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:25:15 -0300, nemesis wrote:

> Jim Henderson escreveu:
>>>> People doing change-on-the-fly editing using pipes might say that
>>>> it's noobs who use crutches like vim or emacs.
>>> Batch editing with pipes and sed has no place in today's fast-paced
>>> interactive programming.
>> 
>> Oh, I don't know about that.  I had to process a couple hundred e-mail
>> messages, generate PDFs of the contents, and re-send them to myself.
>> Easiest way was to export the messages to a text file and run them
>> through a few awk scripts - using pipes.  Fed the results into another
>> awk script that mailed the stuff back to me.
> 
> That's scripting useful tasks, but I probably got the wording ambiguous
> enough so many people replied about the same as you.  Sure scripting is
> useful programming, but by "interactive programming" I meant using
> proper interactive editing tools to *edit program source code*, not awk,
> sed, ed and pipes cause that surely is insane.

Oh, I see - yeah, there are very rare cases I generate awk code using 
pipes, but I have done it for a practical purpose. :-)

>> There again, you're framing it in terms of your experience.  I'm
>> talking about from someone else's POV.  That's much harder to judge for
>> most people because they're not used to standing in someone else's
>> shoes and saying that the other POV might have a point.
> 
> It's not from my experience at all, not hard to judge for other people.
> 
> I mean, surely being able to select and copy a whole block of text with
> y} is just as easy and straightforward to me as is to Joe Sixpack who've
> never seen vim before but whom I've just showed how to do it so he can
> benefit?

Yeah, for the one task, but then learning what to do with it once he's 
selected it?  People resist change, and if Joe Sixpack knows a different 
tool he's going to naturally prefer that tool.

> Moving the mouse to start point, then scanning down the text with the
> both eyes and hands for end point and pressing shift as you click it
> then copying involves 3 time-consuming analogic and imprecise steps that
> simply don't appear when you just want to say "copy block", which is
> what y} just means.  Before the guy even gets to the mouse, I'm done
> already with copying that 100-lines block of text.

I'm not disputing the time involved - but like I said, people are 
generally predisposed to doing things the way they're used to.

Take Blender, for example - how many discussions in here about the 
difficulty of using the interface have there been?  Yet people who use it 
seem to prefer the interface, and the push back is almost always "if you 
take the time to learn it, you'll find it's much more efficient".

> Joe Sixpack can do that too, if only he learns the basics.  There's no
> way otherwise with mouse-based solutions... plus, after you copy the
> text with the mouse, the cursor is left away from the original position.
>   Not in vim.
> 
>> Oh, I don't think so - he's quite adept with the tools he uses, both on
>> Windows and on Linux.  Just because he doesn't do things the way you
>> and I do doesn't mean he's missing out - he might say the same about us
>> because we are "stuck in our old ways of doing things". ;-)
> 
> Ok, kid, now just turn away before your uncle gets back. ;)

LOL

Jim

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