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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 24 2017, @07:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-emacs? dept.

It's an old article, but if you use vi/m it's always good to read a refresher. I've been using the editor for almost 30 years and always learn something new:

If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes.

The open source text editor Vim (Vi IMproved) will be used here to present the ideas about effective editing, but they apply to other editors just as well. Choosing the right editor is actually the first step towards effective editing. The discussion about which editor is the best for you would take too much room and is avoided. If you don't know which editor to use or are dissatisfied with what you are currently using, give Vim a try; you won't be disappointed.

[...] The point is that you need to get to know these commands. You might object that you can't possibly learn all these commands - there are hundreds of different movement commands, some simple, some very clever - and it would take weeks of training to learn them all. Well, you don't need to; instead realize what your specific way of editing is, and learn only those commands that make your editing more effective.

There are three basic steps:

        1. While you are editing, keep an eye out for actions you repeat and/or spend quite a bit of time on.
        2. Find out if there is an editor command that will do this action quicker. Read the documentation, ask a friend, or look at how others do this.
        3. Train using the command. Do this until your fingers type it without thinking.


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  • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Tuesday October 24 2017, @02:27PM (3 children)

    by t-3 (4907) on Tuesday October 24 2017, @02:27PM (#586870)

    Now I'm stuck with vis. Multiple cursors and more powerful regex, so nice. Plus its only 700k on my machine with all the optional dependencies, statically compiled.

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  • (Score: 2) by Post-Nihilist on Wednesday October 25 2017, @02:21AM (2 children)

    by Post-Nihilist (5672) on Wednesday October 25 2017, @02:21AM (#587227)

    Do you know of a good primer on Structural Regular Expressions?
    That sounds like something a computer scientist should learn.....

    Presently the finest regex engine I know of is the one in .Net , i wish grep could do that https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types/grouping-constructs-in-regular-expressions#balancing-group-definitions [microsoft.com] i know that I could do it with grep perl mode and a recursive regex but recursive regex are not only almost impossible to read they are hard to write...

    --
    Be like us, be different, be a nihilist!!!
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @02:29AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @02:29AM (#587232)
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by t-3 on Wednesday October 25 2017, @02:44AM

      by t-3 (4907) on Wednesday October 25 2017, @02:44AM (#587240)

      What the AC linked will get you started, but for me none of it really 'clicked' until I started using them and no longer had to pull up documentation to write stuff that would have had me scratching me head staring at manpages and googling with sed or grep or vim. Being able to parse a complex expression at a glance rather than having to decode it consciously makes things a lot easier.