Re: Commands from insert mode

On 10 Nov 2012, Chris Lott wrote:

[snip]

> > 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.
>
> That might be the least charitable way of interpreting the original
> comments. I took it to mean that writers of prose tend to "write
> forward" a lot more often and for longer durations than, perhaps,
> programmers do. But not necessarily that this is the *only* way in
> which they work.

Sorry if it is uncharitable, but I still find it difficult to understand
how it is possible to write extended prose from scratch without making
numerous corrections, unless you are Bertrand Russell, who apparently
wrote like that - with superb results. Of course, the writers referred
to might simply be copying out material they had previously written in
longhand, as many good authors still do. I used to work in that way
years ago, though I still found myself changing things a lot when I
came to the typing stage.

In books from reputable publishers I've recently found paragraph breaks
in the middle of sentences, words needlessly split by hyphens which are
not at line breaks, and, of course, innumerable spelling mistakes that
sometimes reverse the intended meaning. It becomes obvious that the
original text was drafted at speed on a word processor and no proofs
were read either by the author or by a copy editor. And then
conventional publishers have the cheek to reprove self-published authors
for sloppy productions! [OK, rant over]

>
> I write almost nothing but prose (using Markdown). Vim works quite
> well for that. But I do understand, particularly when drafting, that
> the bouncing between insert and normal modes adds a bit of friction.
> It took me a long time to switch from Emacs because at the drafting
> stage it remained more efficient than Vim. In terms of pure speed
> while drafting, a non-modal editor is probably technically more
> efficient in some ways, but overall it's a win.
>
> I'm still working on methods to make that stage of my writing process
> more efficient. I absolutely understand the desire to make normal mode
> more suited to that particular way of working (recognizing that there
> are, hopefully, further editing stages involved :) It has helped me to
> consider Vim a text processing engine rather than an editor.
>

Thanks for the tip about Markdown - I'll look into it. I must also think
further about ways of making vim more efficient in Insert mode. I've
never really tried Emacs very much, but when I migrate my drafts to Lyx,
which I do for books, I am working modelessly. I know that many writers
use Lyx from scratch, but I find it easier to make big changges in Vim.

In my early forays into computing, years ago, I was using DOS, with a
word processor called Protext which was modal. When I made the switch to
Linux I found that Vim and Protext were quite similar in principle,
which is probably why I stayed with Vim.

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




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