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

[Peter Schoefer <ps snafu de>]

On Tue, 7 Jul 1998, Steve Hosgood wrote:

> > 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!
> 
Hi,
I think this discussion should be about the pro and cons of vi-KEYBINDINGS
and not about editors.

In my opinion every real life application needs accelerators, because for
a "power user" mouse control will become boring and ineffective. We have
them for menus and dialogs and and there is a discussion about a style
guide. 

For vi-bindings is a lot of documentation available which fits the needs
of beginners as well as gurus. Besides that they are well designed to
support fast typing. The alternative would be to (re-)invent a system of
comparable quality, write really good docu and maybe convince users of the
superiority of your approach.

--
Peter Schoefer
phone: +49 30 6123204
email: ps@snafu.de