full-fledged pidgin

vim: vi *improved*? my ass.

Posted in unrelated by clunis on the October 6th, 2007

Excuse me, but vi did not need to be improved. It was fine as it was. What’s with the broken undo behavior in vim? Visual mode selection? yuck. Tabbed editing? wtf.

I say this thing should be called ‘vid’ for ‘vi defiled’.

/grumpy

One Response to 'vim: vi *improved*? my ass.'

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  1. willie said,

    on October 8th, 2007 at 7:43 pm

    Back in my day, whenever we’d make mistake, we were forced to live with it, and we liked it. :)

    BTW, try using the cntrl-R key combo to redo. cntrl-U is always undo, and cntrl-R is always redo. Just like opt-x, opt-c, and opt-v are always cut, copy and paste, they don’t change depending on your context.

    There are numerous features which make the traditional vi barely useful for development. It’s lacking:

    * multiple undos (or is it undoes?) If you change modes, then you lose access to all of your previous changes
    * visual mode
    * syntax coloring - saved me countless debugging hours
    * long line support - try editing a large mysql data dump, vi will corrupt your file
    * ex history - try doing a complex search & replace on multiple files. When you go to your next file, you have to enter your expression again.

    I’ve taken to making the old version of vi on my systems into a symlink to vim in order to save disk space.