Re: [Sheflug] vi, emacs, sharp sticks

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Chris" == Chris J/#6 <sixie [at] nccnet.co.uk> writes:

    Chris> Well...running external commands on a region is possible in
    Chris> vi. The '%' is just a shortcut for "all lines". Just
    Chris> replace with '10,.' or '0,4' or '100,$' as appropriate. :)

Surely vi has some kind of mark and a notion of "the current region"?

    Chris> It should work [in vi] though; no reason why it won't :)

I don't doubt it; the only real point (besides showing people who
_like_ Emacs something they may not have seen before) is that there
are people who want to do these things inside their editor
(Emacs-type) and people who have the forethought and patience to wait
until they get back to the shell (vi-type).  Also, Emacs people would
rather remember a million separate key sequences, uniquely bound to
each command, whereas vi people are modal, and prefer to shift from
one set of bindings to another as context changes, thus limiting the
number of key sequences they need to ever emit.

Emacs is optimized for the former.  It has "shell buffers", but
they're clunkier than a real shell for shell-type work (precisely
because Emacs usurps a lot of shell bindings).  vi is optimized for
the latter; you can do a lot of those things inside of vi, but often
it's easier to save a file and push to a shell (rather than count
lines or whatever).

    Chris> I'm not impressed because you're just showing off.

Nothin' wrong with that?

    Chris> *grin*

<chortle />



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