Friday, February 18, 2011

Re: OT: Vim Humans are...

Hi all of outside in the wonderful word of vim ! :)

Oh what interesting answers you all posted : GREAT ! :)

*** THANK YOU ALL! ***

My perception of text and I mean mainly config files, source code
or more generally "technical used text" has become more as being
built "from parts" as of a "stream" while using vim.

I started using LINUX fifteen years ago and my first contact with
an editor under this unixyfied operating system was nano. Then I used jed
for a longer time, then XEMACS, which I leave because the joints
of my fingers became bad due to all this simultanous pressing of
ESCAPE,META,ALT,CTRL and SHIFT...

I also became frustrated about the startup times of XEMACS...

Then a collegue told me about vim...and I thought: "OH MY [CENSORED].
*This* damned beast wants to be better then /XEMACS/???"

But I only knew the rumors...told from people, which never
tried vim and repeating people, which ... and so forth...

I tried it and...I am still learning new things.
This implies the following: A tool, which can be
completly learned and "mastered" in - say - a month or
let it be half a year is not worth the effort, since as
soon as it is completly understood it changes from being a
challenge to being a barrier.

A tool, which offers that much as vim does, cannot become
a barrier, since any answer to a question like
"Can I do XYZ with vim" needs to explored, investigated,
asked...
There are no much cases to say: "This text task is beyond
the scope of vim".

The ensurance of "there must be a way to accomplish this with
vim" is exactly what drives people to the new.

"I understand this completly" is a statement which may be understood
as "This is not longer interesting".

THIS keeps vim a highly interesting and challanging tool. It is like
UNIX. There are only statements like "I understand it better right
now."-- "I completly understand it in any aspect." is simply not possible.
And this is GOOD!

"There must be a way to accomplish this and the only barrier
between me and the solution for this is my own knowledge of
the way to the solution."

For me makeing this a valid statement is the ultimate feature of vim.

And yes, it does not alter my perception of text alone....

Ah! By the way: For all non native English speakers here...get a
dictionary and look up for the translation of the
english word "vim" to your language...if you dont know already. ;)
(I discovered this just a few minutes ago while searching www.dict.cc
for some vocabularies for this posting ... ;)

And last but not least:
A tool without the community for this tool is no tool a all!
And the community of vim people is really helpful, friendly and the direct
opposite of "for experts only".

Thank you all ! :)

Best regards,
mcc

PS: I see some parallels in UNIX-people and VIM-people.
Beside being a great operating system, UNIX was designed
to handle text. Look at tools like sed, awk, ed, ex, more,
grep, fmt, col.....


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