Re: [chat] Editor anxiety

[mark@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 01:57:14AM +1000, James Peter Gregory wrote:
> > >Given that the popular UNIX editors are pretty fully featured, does anyone
> > >else apart from me ever worry that they aren't getting everything from them
> > >that they can? Does anyone else set aside time to try and learn their tools
> > >a bit better?
> 1337 vim trick of the week:
> 
> hit ctrl-p or ctrl-n when in insert mode to get vim to auto complete your
> identifiers. You can also give it a dictionary file to takes stuff from when
> it can't find an instance of a matching identifier in your code.
> 
> It's actually become somewhat competitive at my work to see who knows the
> 1337est vim commands each week.

This is what I'm talking about. How much time did people waste before they
found out about ctrl-n and ctrl-p in vim (M-/ in emacs)? How much time do 
other people who haven't worked this out continue to waste? I shudder to think
of the hordes of people who've yet to discover auto-indenting modes and so
forth.

I guess there's a reasonable upper bound on how long you can spend learning to
use your tools to work better as opposed to actually working.

> :make is pretty 1337 too.
> I'm yet to learn the macro language though. One of these days I'll have to
> write a vim macro to compute the real fourier transform of a ppm file or
> something.
> Then I could take that code and feed it audio files and get phat bass out of
> my mp3's by multiplying the lower co-efficents by some factor and saving to
> /dev/dsp.
> However, when one has thoughts of doing scientific computation with a text
> editor it is either time for more coffee or time to switch to emacs.

I think most emacs users that I've run across would be as aghast as everyone
else that you're contemplating trying to get subharmonic synthesis into a
text editor :)

Besides which, I tend to trust the sound engineers who produce albums, and 
consider what they do art. As such, I'm unwilling to tamper with it.

-- 
Mark