Re: [gtk-list] Re: vi bindings for text widgets

[Steve Hosgood <iisteve iiweeble swan ac uk>]

> On Fri, 3 Jul 1998, matt wrote:
> > what is the possiblity of someone hacking in
> > vi bindings into the text and text entry widgets?
> >

Shevek replied:
> Yes please. I think this would be a very good idea, maybe an input mode
> like bash has for readline.
> 

Please, no!
Why can we never break with the past and move forwards? Vi and Emacs and
other such things were fine in their time, i.e the late 1970's and early
1980's when the "glass-TTY" with programmable cursor-control was the latest
thing to have, and the lack of anything much more than an alphanumeric
keyboard forced the use of weird mode-switching and strange ctrl-meta key
sequences in order to implement a screen editor at all.

But now we're in the late 1990's! We've got decent keyboards. We've got
mice. We've got X.

Time to forget Vi and Emacs and move to Nedit, gedit and other modern editors!
I consider that Vi-like support for readline was a serious mistake. It
means that you can't just lean over a colleage's shoulder and type a couple
of commands on his/her terminal (this happened to me a couple of weeks
ago). Why isn't there any mouse support for readline?

                           ----------------------

BTW, before anyone tells me off, I started with 'ed' in 1978. I was one of
those who migrated to the wizzo new glass-TTY technology and Vi when I
got the chance in the early 1980's. I kept to a Vi clone when I spent 6
years in the DOS wilderness 1988-1994. Then I got linux and X and moved
over to Nedit.

I'm overjoyed to have finally escaped from Vi, just as I was happy to lose
'ed' all those years ago. Doesn't anyone else want to move with the times, or
am I some sort of techo-mobile weirdo?

Rude answers to that last question to /dev/null please!

--

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