[Chicago] Vim or Emacs

[Tm Ottinger]

Certainly, but if you develop skills with vim, emacs, and/or eclipse you also get an additional thrill as the code appears almost as you think it, and seems to dance on the screen.  It is something nano, notepad, and VS.NET cannot give  .

Of course these thrills cost you at least a  month of painfully tedious practice and lower productivity before muscle memory and productive habits take over.

I mainly like vim because it doesn't use weird key "chords" so much other than ^w for gui window commands.  Once you know it, it is more like typing normally.



-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Dennewitz <matt at datawaslost.net>
Sent: June 03, 2008 12:30 AM
To: The Chicago Python Users Group <chicago at python.org>
Subject: Re: [Chicago] Vim or Emacs


You folks are all insane. Writing code isnt about crazy key combos or  
whomever can fracture the most carpals executing the sweetest macro;  
its about what you write and the thrill of building something and  
watching it come to life.


On Jun 2, 2008, at 9:43 PM, Cosmin Stejerean wrote:

>> I've heard this advice countless times, and tried it on several
>> occasions ... and I ultimately found it to make keystrokes *harder*.
>> I think this may result from three things:
>>
>> 1) I also use my left pinky to hit the Alt/Option and Command keys;
>> using Caps as Control makes my pinky have to bounce back and forth
>> between the two areas, resulting in plenty of mis-strokes and/or
>> slowness as I "feel" for which key is Alt.
>
> You can use your pinky to press the Command key? Perhaps it depends
> based on the kind of keyboard but I just tried on a MBP and there's no
> way I could do that regularly without seriously injuring my hand. I
> generally use my thumb for the Command and Option keys.
>
>> 2) Caps as Control makes certain key combinations (e.g., Control-Z)  
>> difficult.
>
> Are you just changing capslock to Control or are you swapping them (so
> Control becomes Capslock)? I never use capslock so I get two Control
> keys by my left pinky so I can use whichever is most comfortable.
>
>> 3) My brain can't seem to handle context-based finger switching,
>> making Control-Shift-[key] combos a great big mess.
>
> How do you normally type Control-Shift combos? The recommended way
> would be to use the Control and Shift on opposite sides of the
> keyboard. But now that I think of it I don't think I've used
> Control-Shift combos much outside of Eclipse (and that was before I
> learned about Emacs key bindings in Eclipse).
>
> One of the big problems with using capslock as control is that it
> makes it nearly impossible to type on somebody else's computer.  I
> really wish I could find a laptop with a key layout similar to
> http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm (I use that for my desktop).
>
> -- 
> Cosmin 

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