Re: [dev] Experimental editor

On 15 June 2011 12:26, markus schnalke <meillo_AT_marmaro.de> wrote:
> What's the difference between a mode and a ``quasimode''?

What's the difference between shift and caps lock?

> Surely, the problems are knowing in which mode you're in and switching
> modes. But in return, each mode lets you re-use your keyboard keys
> (the optimum) and for each mode you can design a new editor that's
> best suited for the kind of editing this mode is intended to do.

This is the sort of argument, imo, which led to the modal soup that is
emacs. I want there to be just a collection of buffers, and typing
into command buffer is what gives you `command mode', sam style. We
always use the same keys, because all we're doing is editing text, so
it becomes muscle memory.

On 15 June 2011 13:12, Peter John Hartman <peterjohnhartman_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> Why would you want several editors?  The problem with vi and mutt is that
> they have all these keybindings; hence you can on occasion find yourself in
> some crazy dark key combination that you didn't mean to be in.

This. I want keys to always mean the same thing. Too often they don't,
and you end up not knowing what on Earth is happening. With this
approach, all you need to keep in mind is where your cursor is.

On 15 June 2011 14:01, David Tweed <david.tweed_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> One big disadvantage of doing everything "by hand" is
> that such stuff isn't in an undo history that you can execute.

Yeah, this is one of the benefits of having a command buffer: the
shell is just a special case of text editing. You can run editor
commands, like mass selections, replacements, etc, and you can also
call Unix commands with `!'. (`!sh' basically gives you a shell in
your editor for free.)

My view of that kind of editing is, you select the third word in the
fourth sentence (either by leaping or with the mouse), hop over to the
command buffer (Ctrl-Tab?), and run `x/[aeiou]/d'. If you want
something weird like sorting a file, just use `|sort'.

Thanks,
cls
Received on Wed Jun 15 2011 - 15:47:55 CEST