Re: Microsoft Introduces New Command-Line Text Editor

On 5/20/2025 8:48 PM, Paul wrote:

On Tue, 5/20/2025 4:35 PM, Jeff Barnett wrote:

On 5/20/2025 1:25 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Tue, 20 May 2025 07:54:59 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

      Microsoft also wanted to avoid the “how do I exit vim?” meme, so it
      built its own text editor instead of relying on other available
      options.

I'll admit I wondered how to exit vim, or the original vi to be specific,
but that was 45 years or so ago.

In the early 1980s (approximately when you were trapped in the vim maze) an excited colleague told me I just had to try out some new version of EMACS running on our PDP10 farm at ISI - I had been using some other editor. I was having some fun figuring out a few simple commands; then I tried to exit: ctr x, ctr q, etc. After 15 minutes I screamed for help. I avoided EMACS after that until a few years latter when I was using the grown up adult version integrated into the Symbolics Lisp Machine's development environment. Life had changed for the good.

The word "EMACS" was its own meme.

It's like playing Rachmaninoff. According to a colleague who was enjoying
EMACS at his desk "some of the chords are hard to play and you need a
good hand span" :-)

Somehow VIM just isn't the same.

The keyboards that came that came with the Lisp machines had cap, ctrl,
meta, hyper, and maybe one other such key; the mouse had three buttons
and you could chord with both hands. The mouse "knew" the types you were
pointing at and the menus adjust to sensible options for the type of
data of the object represented by what the mouse was on. After
overcoming disbelief that all this was working reasonably quickly and
properly, it was a real joy. And, by the way, the keys I mentioned above
were so arranged that it was not hard to reach virtually any chord.
--
Jeff Barnett