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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @02:39PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @02:39PM (#586872)

    Jif was just a brand name, the reason I heard they changed it was because in some countries (e.g. Spanish speaking ones) had trouble pronouncing it, so they changed it to Cif. Anyway, I think they did do lemon juice, which you might put on pancakes, but were better known for their cleaning products.

    What do you think Compuserve claimed to have a patent on, lemon juice, or the name "Jif"? Because lemon juice is obviously not patentable, and neither is a name, what you do to names is trademark them, and trademarks are often restricted by types of businesses, so you can have two different companies selling products under the same trademarked name, but because they sell different types of products, there is no conflict.

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  • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday October 25 2017, @03:41PM

    by theluggage (1797) on Wednesday October 25 2017, @03:41PM (#587412)

    What do you think Compuserve claimed to have a patent on, lemon juice, or the name "Jif"?

    Darn, the internet filtered out those invisible <joke> tags again.

    vim (editor) => Vim (kitchen cleaner) => jif (kitchen cleaner) => Jif (lemon juice) => GIF (Graphics Interchange Format). None actually related to the other AFAIK although both of the Jifs smell of lemon...

    Jif (disambiguation) [wikipedia.org].

    The GIF case [wikipedia.org] was an early example of software patent blight in the 1990s. Now you've made me do more reference checking than was necessary for a silly comment, I owe Compuserve an apology - it was Unisys who tried to assert the patent.

    Turns out that there was a lawsuit over Jif lemon too... You live and learn...