At 05:10 PM 4/10/99 -0400, Nigel Stepp wrote:
>Hi, it's the vi guy again. I was just curious what subset of vi commands
>you would be comfortable with. I'm assuming you don't want to duplicate
>vi.
good question. my thoughts were that we don't want to
reinvent vi, but rather take the edge off using it....
the thought was if we can give the user a simple subset of
VI and a simple subset of emacs that could give you most of
what you use 90% of the time, we'd be fine -- and our fingers
wouldn't be twisted by the CUA thing....
most word processors that i've seen have some variation
of CUA keys (arrow keys, Ctlr-x (cut),...) which causes
everyone who works with vi or emacs to get their fingers
tied in knots -- i can't tell you how many times i've sent
a partially composed email in eudora by typing Ctrl-E (when
i wanted to go to the end of a line).
>See, I was adding lots of stuff last night, and noticed just how
>complicated the vi command set is. The problem is that in vi, there are
>commands like y, which can operate on a motion (such as w,{,$, etc). So,
>the copy command just takes the motion as an argument. But in the abiword
>key bindings, each must be made separately. If I were to add all of the
>commands with all of the motions (the ones abiword will allow anyway) it
>would add up to quite a bit.
yes, that's a drawback to the way i laid out the tables. but
it does allow us to put in arbitraily long key sequences, like
in emacs. also, i wanted to put in a syntax, but never got
around to it, that might take away some of the pain (and let us
load custom keybindings dynamically... :-)
at this point i wouldn't worry about the quantity of EditMethods
or the number of keybindings -- let's just get a *nice* useable
set.
btw, how many keys are there like c,d,y which have a set of motion
keys following them ??
>Right now I have $,(,),/,0,?,A,D,G,I,O,P,X,Y,[,],^,a,e,h,i,j,k,l,n,o,p,r
>u,w,x,{, and }. As well as prefix keys c,d,and y operating on motions
>^,$,(,),b,w,[,and ]. These correspond to beginning and end of
>line, sentence, word, and block, respectively. Is this too much? ok? not
>enough?
cool. i'm not much of a VI user (i don't recognize many of these),
so perhaps others could comment. to me this is a great step forward.
>I wanted to put in some colon commands as well, so that you could bring
>up the save dialog with :w or close with :q, but then thought that's a
>little too much like implementing vi all over again.
the colon line is more problematic. no matter how cool it'd be
to have a colon line or emacs mini-buffer, i don't think it'd mesh
well. but making : a prefix character and binding :w and :q
to the dialogs would be fine -- the emacs keys ^X^F and ^X^S and etc
are bound this way now.
jeff