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A Look at Vim, a Text Editor for the Ages

posted by chromas on Wednesday August 22 2018, @09:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the :wq dept.

hubie writes:

Over at The New Stack is a brief but entertaining history of the editor vi and Vim.

"The editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore," Joy said. "It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore."

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @03:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @03:03PM (#725226)

    Vim has a similar function to what you describe. It probably doesn't exist in traditional vi.

    ctrl+v to enter visual block mode
    highlight the text you want to manipulate
    then you can use x to cut it
    or maybe maybe y to copy it
    and p to paste it somewhere else if you want.

    you can use I to insert text on every line (appearing to the left of the selected block), or A to append text on every line (appearing to the right of the selected block).

    This is the mechanism I personally use most often for adding/removing indentation levels in blocks of code.