When Kim was pregnant with Kovi I wrote a program that emulated vi. I called the program kovi. Part of that program I actually use every day. I wrote a graphical diff that was going to work with kovi. I use it as my external diff for git and actually for all my graphical diffing and diff merging. The "vi" in Kovi is no coincidence... believe it or not.With all the experimentation with voice recognition I was sure I was outdated by using this editor from the '80s. I actually thought that with all the keyboarding and vi's keyboard interface that maybe it was vi's fault in some respects. Maybe it was by hitting the escape key over and over again! I have evaluated a few IDEs. I also found a Dragon NaturallySpeaking macro file setup for vi.
But with my recent discovery of Dragon NaturallySpeaking's "Spell Mode" and the accuracy when you use the Alpha, bravo, Charlie lingo... suddenly vim became my new friend...
I am rapidly becoming a vim expert. All along, vi was much more powerful and begged me to use it efficiently... but I learned up to a certain point, and was good at it, but I did so much unnecessary typing. It is so funny now, looking back, I typed like I had a million years... and the answer for everything was typing faster, and maybe a bit smarter... I never thought that typing on the stupid computer would just end.
Anyhow, there is one way one can learn to use vi more efficiently and smarter... lose your arms! For some reason, I always have to learn things the hard way.
I have read a whole bunch online... and am adopting a lot of the simple things I should have done a million years ago. Today, I bought this book. I can't wait to use any little tweak to make things better. It's amazing and stupid all at the same time - vi... maybe like that funny looking critter on the cover of the O'Reilly book.
The latest thing I am doing is doing vi macro recordings and writing them up on the white board as I go. I bet I sound really funny using a mix of UNIX aliases, vi commands, Dragon commands etc.
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I've always thought it significant that some of the original UNIX guys were from a humanities background rather than, say, electrical engineering or math. They valued text. Computer languages were languages with verbs and nouns and grammars and syntax. There are traces of this still around. One of the requirements for the PhD in Literature at UH is a knowledge of two other languages. One of those is allowed to be a computer language. When Bill Joy wrote vi (actually in 1976!) he used abbreviations for commands: a=append, d=delete, w=write etc. I think because of that, I found vi much easier to learn than emacs, and much more efficient per keystroke. But both are more efficient than using the mouse for everything. With a mouse you have less to remember, but with text you have a whole alphabet of expressibility. Go text!
Speaking of Kovi, tell him that Paw & MeMaw said that his "Thank You" card was the coolest one we've ever received! Like father... like son!
Actuallym Kaley wrote all of those cards. :-)
Does this mean that Kaley has dropped one on the intelligence scale? What kind of kid doesn't like four sided objects?!
Remember your high school students? Not all of them, of course!
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