Re: Commands from insert mode

On 08 Nov 2012, Ed Kostas wrote:

[snip]

> In the world at large, besides the engineer, there are creative
> writers who seldom move the cursor, or even erase characters, or make
> corrections. These people just type forward. In the old days of
> typewriters, they would type their manuscripts, and almost never would
> make corrections, or erase text. In fact, with a typewriter, the
> result of correction is not very good. This kind of writers live in
> the insertion mode, with short incursions to normal mode. My question:
> In this case, do you think that it would make sense to provide a short
> escape into normal mode?

I find the thought of creative [sic] writers who "almost never make
corrections" deeply depressing although perfectly believable in the
light of the sloppy verbose writing I encounter these days, even in
books from well-known publishers.

I do all my initial drafts of books and other material in (g)vim and
rewrite endlessly, with lots of cutting and pasting. In the old days I
used to write everything on a typewriter and was continually striking
stuff out and rewriting it, which resulted in the frequent need to
retype whole pages to make them presentable. The thought of going back
to that fills me with horror.

I have no difficulty with Insert/Normal modes though I have made one or
two mappings for things I do frequently, such as formatting a paragraph.
I find it helpful to have the useless and annoying CapsLock key mapped
to Esc.

[snip]


> By the way, nowadays lawyers plead electronically. I mean, instead of
> typing the document, printing the document, and submitting a hard copy
> to the judge, they prepare the document in LaTeX with a text editor
> (say, Emacs), produce a pdf output (say, with pdflatex), and submit
> the result to the court. A text editor, like Vim, with a very fast
> start up is appreciated.


I should have thought that Lyx would be better for this than either vim
or emacs - it would save a lot of time. My own practice for "creative"
writing is to work in vim with lots of cutting and pasting until I've
got things more or less as I want them and then to paste the result into
Lyx if I want to print it as a book or something similar.

Anthony

--
Anthony Campbell - ac@acampbell.org.uk
http://www.reviewbooks.org.uk
http://www.skepticviews.org.uk
http://www.acupuncturecourse.org.uk
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