Vincent Le Chevalier wrote:
>> Oh, Vim is an OK text editor. It's just not that fantastic...
> Well yes, it's not an operating system ;-)

It's more unixy than emacs, using shell call-outs to do stuff instead of 
reimplementing every filter and program as an editor macro. :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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> Vincent Le Chevalier <gal### [at] libertyALLsurfSPAMfr> wrote:
>> Cream
>> is just easier for me to use than gVim. It is not modal, for a start :-)
> 
> which probably means you're using it just like notepad on steroids.
> 

Exactly. And this is plenty enough for my needs...

> There's nothing faster nor easier for text editing than vi's modal nature.
> Nothing can beat "." for repeating the last command nor is copying a whole,
> possibly longish, block of text done with such ease as just typing "y}"
> 

It's only faster or easier when you are used to it. Call me dumb but 
when using vanilla Vim I find myself pressing Esc too much and 
forgetting to press 'i' way too often :-)

Having some of the power of Vim with an interface more similar to other 
common editors is valuable IMHO.

-- 
Vincent

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>> Oh, Vim is an OK text editor. It's just not that fantastic...
> 
> Well yes, it's not an operating system ;-)
> 
> I don't know, what feature(s) do you miss?
> 
> I'm fairly certain I'm using Vim at a fraction of its capacity, so I 
> don't feel any incentive to move, personally...

Well, you know, it's a text-mode editor. I guess by definition that 
places rather strong limits on what useful things it can do. For example,

- You can't click on where you want the cursor to move to. You must 
manually move the cursor around using several million arrow key presses.

- You can't cut and paste blocks of text.

- You can't change the display to fit more than 80 characters on the screen.

- You can't have multiple files open at once. (Well, unless you count 
using virtual terminals.)

- You can't realistically do syntax hilighting. (Well, again, I suppose 
theoretically you could - but with only 8 colours available, how good is 
that going to look?)

It's not that Vim is a bad product - I'm not sure how any possible 
text-mode program could possibly overcome these limitations. They seem 
to be inherant in the description "text-mode program" rather than 
specific to Vim itself...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> 
> It's not that Vim is a bad product - I'm not sure how any possible 
> text-mode program could possibly overcome these limitations. They seem 
> to be inherant in the description "text-mode program" rather than 
> specific to Vim itself...
> 

But all of these flaws are fixed in GUI versions of Vim, including Cream 
and probably WinVi.

As for syntax highlighting, maybe try to type :syntax on in a text-mode 
Vim and see for yourself if it works... Though I still prefer it in the 
GUIs.

-- 
Vincent

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> - You can't click on where you want the cursor to move to. You must 
> manually move the cursor around using several million arrow key presses.

I can use the mouse even on the text-mode vim over a remote ssh connection.

> - You can't cut and paste blocks of text.

Of course you can. It's just called 'yank' and doesn't use the system 
clipboard by default. You can also use the mouse to select the block 
before copying. On Windows you can use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for consistency.

> - You can't change the display to fit more than 80 characters on the 
> screen.

Yes you can. On the GUI, you resize the window. On text-mode on an 
decent console, you resize the window (that includes a putty window 
connected to a remote copmuter). On text-mode on Windows command prompt, 
you can't resize it (that's a Windows flaw), but you can change the 
column count manually with :set columns=100; I just tried it and it 
works on Windoze too. Who would use text-mode on Windows anyway?

> - You can't have multiple files open at once. (Well, unless you count 
> using virtual terminals.)

Vim can split the window, and show different files on each. It also has 
tabs on the GUI version; but I never tried that on text-mode. Split 
windows definitely works (and if your console supports mouse, you can 
resize the split by dragging too).

> - You can't realistically do syntax hilighting. (Well, again, I suppose 
> theoretically you could - but with only 8 colours available, how good is 
> that going to look?)

Consoles have 16 colors usually, not 8. Some Unix consoles support 4096. 
Vim can use all 16 million colors on the GUI, but do you *really* need 
them? Probably not. The default color schemes would be happy on 8-bit color.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Well, you know, it's a text-mode editor. I guess by definition that
> places rather strong limits on what useful things it can do.

yes, I guess working on streams of bytes also "places rather strong limits on
what useful things" a computer it can do...

> - You can't click on where you want the cursor to move to. You must
> manually move the cursor around using several million arrow key presses.

really?  This is not true as of this age and even if it was true, believe me:
arrow keys are evil.  Use "{" or "}" to jump between paragraphs and other
blocks of text, "50G" to go to line 50, "(" or ")" to jump between sentences
and when you want to go back to previous stops, "CTRL+O" goes back through the
location stack...

> - You can't cut and paste blocks of text.

you're insane:  "3y}" copies the 3 long blocks of text below without even
thinking about it.  "p" places it just before the cursor.  If you want the
notepad graphical way, gVim and others do it just fine and still let you work
the more productive modal way.

> - You can't change the display to fit more than 80 characters on the screen.

gVim lets you even change the font!  I use gVim on Windows or else I'd hang
myself on the office...

> - You can't have multiple files open at once. (Well, unless you count
> using virtual terminals.)

Vim has had multiple buffers and even sessions for ages now.  I'm sure you're
using just limited ol' vi in some ancient Unix...

> - You can't realistically do syntax hilighting. (Well, again, I suppose
> theoretically you could - but with only 8 colours available, how good is
> that going to look?)

pretty friggin' good.  Try :syntax enable and :colorscheme koehler

I do povray stuff in it and pov SDL syntax highlighting is not usually found or
integrated into most text editors...

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Vincent Le Chevalier <gal### [at] libertyALLsurfSPAMfr> wrote:

> But all of these flaws are fixed in GUI versions of Vim

modal text-editing using keyboard only is far from being a flaw:  I call it
productive.

> As for syntax highlighting, maybe try to type :syntax on in a text-mode
> Vim and see for yourself if it works... Though I still prefer it in the
> GUIs.

I don't think you understand:  typing :syntax enable or disable also works on
the graphical versions, at least on gVim.

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nemesis wrote:

>> - You can't click on where you want the cursor to move to. You must
>> manually move the cursor around using several million arrow key presses.
> 
> really?  This is not true as of this age and even if it was true, believe me:
> arrow keys are evil.  Use "{" or "}" to jump between paragraphs and other
> blocks of text, "50G" to go to line 50, "(" or ")" to jump between sentences
> and when you want to go back to previous stops, "CTRL+O" goes back through the
> location stack...

None of these things quite compares to "I want to put the cursor *here*..."

[Although, finding like 138726 quickly might be useful if the compiler 
reported an error on line 138726.]

> you're insane:  "3y}"

...riiiiight. *I* am insane? ;-)

>> - You can't realistically do syntax hilighting. (Well, again, I suppose
>> theoretically you could - but with only 8 colours available, how good is
>> that going to look?)
> 
> pretty friggin' good.  Try :syntax enable and :colorscheme koehler
> 
> I do povray stuff in it and pov SDL syntax highlighting is not usually found or
> integrated into most text editors...

LOL. I'm loving that filename...

Doesn't much seem to resemble the little program I end up having to use 
when I'm trying to fix a broken Linux install where /etc/fstab is messed 
up or some such and I need to edit it. You certainly can't get more than 
80 characters on screen there - because the terminal window is only 80 
characters wide.

For sure you can run a text-mode program inside a terminal window. I 
didn't know somebody had actually put buttons on it by now though. Still 
doesn't look like much fun to actually use...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

...in summary, a GUI version exists now.

>> - You can't realistically do syntax hilighting. (Well, again, I 
>> suppose theoretically you could - but with only 8 colours available, 
>> how good is that going to look?)
> 
> Consoles have 16 colors usually, not 8. Some Unix consoles support 4096. 
> Vim can use all 16 million colors on the GUI, but do you *really* need 
> them? Probably not. The default color schemes would be happy on 8-bit 
> color.

Really? That's interesting. I know that VGA gives you 16 colours, but I 
thought it was hard-wired so that you can only use 8 of those for the 
foreground, and the other 8 for the background?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> Vincent Le Chevalier <gal### [at] libertyALLsurfSPAMfr> wrote:

>> But all of these flaws are fixed in GUI versions of Vim
> 
> modal text-editing using keyboard only is far from being a flaw:  I call it
> productive.

I wasn't talking about modal text-editing but of the flaws of Vim *as 
perceived by Andrew*. He did not seem aware of GUI versions that solve 
most of his gripes by default; I never said there were no way to do that 
in text-mode.

>> As for syntax highlighting, maybe try to type :syntax on in a text-mode
>> Vim and see for yourself if it works... Though I still prefer it in the
>> GUIs.
> 
> I don't think you understand:  typing :syntax enable or disable also works on
> the graphical versions, at least on gVim.
> 

Have I said somewhere that it doesn't? I think you misunderstood my 
post. What I meant to say was that syntax highlighting does work even 
with the relatively limited number of colors available in text-mode, but 
that I prefer the colors that can be defined in graphical versions.

-- 
Vincent

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