19 Likes
Pshaw. “dd” for me. As far as worrying about insert mode, I use “ce” and “A” as much possible. [I still want that pedal though].
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As a kid I used EDLIN due to the lack of an alternative, and I even remember sort of liking it, or rather, liking being able to use it, but not so much that I used it even once after MS-DOS 5.0 came out with an actual plausible text editor. I would say, if you’re clinging to vim, you should think carefully about what you’re trying to prove and (given that it’s a solo activity) to whom you’re trying to prove it.
However, UIs in general should make much more use of foot pedals.
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VI is insanely anachronistic, but it is always there and demands only vt100 terminal emulation (an insane anachronism in itself). If I am in a console window and want to do a quick edit and don’t want to mess with X, yeah I will use VI. But you know how are crazy those guys who use kedit/xedit?
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you generally never touch the trackpad or mouse
Trackball, you insensitive clod!
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Oh Wordstar, how I loved thee. I still have TSEPro (Qedit’s successor) configured with the Wordstar key mappings…
Speaking of which, I’ve never found a better editor than TSEPro/Qedit for working with arbitrary columns of text.
Sorry is that the brake, clutch or throttle? Is heel and toe supported?
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It has help mode as well, the one I am always trying to get out of.
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(Because the Escape key is too far away. Sigh!)
But People, if you’re going to talk about “footpedals” you better start talking about “handhandles”. Tautology much?
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I know it’s supposed to be pronounced “vee eye”, but I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it any other way than “vie” (i.e. rhyming with “lie”).
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Vim has six BASIC modes:
- Normal mode …
- Visual mode …
- Select mode …
- Insert mode …
- Command-line mode …
- Ex mode …
There are six ADDITIONAL modes. These are variants of the BASIC modes:
- Operator-pending mode …
- Replace mode …
- Virtual mode …
- Insert Normal mode …
- Insert Visual mode …
- Insert Select mode …
That’ll delete the whole line, instead of just that part of it after the cursor.
Use CTRL-[ instead. If you remap your caps-lock to be a nice big fat control key, all you have to do is move both pinkies slightly.
6 Likes
looks like a sewing machine pedal, which is an analogue device, You should be able to use the pedal to replace dozens of keys.
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Vim certainly does use the arrow keys (hell, even vi on HP-sUX uses the arrow keys). The arrow keys let you move around without leaving insert mode.
Love the vim clutch & will build (because I have several spare pedals in the scrap heap).
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Blasphemer! For the faithful enter the Holy Words, yea even unto their .vimrc:
map <Up> <Nop>
map <Down> <Nop>
map <Left> <Nop>
map <Right> <Nop>
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Unsurprisingly I am in the tsk-tsk camp. The point of vim is keyboard muscle memory, having a pedal in place of the most vital key would break that so hard. What’s the point of training yourself so you’re unable to use vim anywhere but at home?
Besides, 99% of the time you can exit insert mode with Ctrl-C, which is pretty convenient, you only need ESC when recording macros with q.
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That looks a bit… baroque.
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I’ve been a long-time vim user (originally beginning with vi). There are a lot of features in vim that I haven’t used, but for basic text editing it’s far and away my favorite.
Oddly, though, for command-line history editing I prefer Emacs key bindings.
I have fantastic news for you.
On a more general note, I bought a couple of these after seeing them on dansdata to test how they might help users with disability. I didn’t find a good use for them at the time, but now this has reminded me I might dig them out and see if I can find a situation that requires more pedals.
I’m just reminded that, for lack of word processing software, I used to type school papers, stories, etc. in Multiplan on a DECmate II. We’d format the page for (I think) 8 columns, then enter text one line at a time, being mindful not to type past an approximate point that might exceed the eighth column’s width. Also, double-quotes weren’t allowed – instead I’d use two single-quotes.
Later on (1987) we got hold of a Commodore 64 (fairly old even by then), and I used that version of Multiplan to write my junior theme. We had a Brother daisywheel typewriter* and found some sort of interface cable at Toys R Us (of all places) that allowed the Brother to function as a printer.
*The Brother had its own set of challenges. The daisywheel mechanism would only strike at a certain speed, no matter how quickly one could type. I could hunt-and-peck a little faster than it would print, but for a good typist, several lines might have gone past before a mistake was spotted. When we hooked that thing up as a printer it just about went all night, at (I’d guess) 5 characters a second.
3 Likes
You know Readline key bindings? Of course you do, they’re in your shell, your REPL, and perhaps even the GUI for your OS. They’re similar to Emacs key bindings (C-a for home), but with several concessions for UNIX (C-w for delete word).
With rsi.vim, I’ve taken that same concession philosophy and extended it to Vim. Get the most useful of the ubiquitous key bindings without blindly overriding built-in Vim functionality.
