Re: Commands from insert mode

El Viernes, 9 de noviembre de 2012, Ed Kostas escribió:
> 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?

Besides being an engineer, I also wrote prose in LaTeX and DocBook (well,
mostly technical documents, but with some long paragraphs without equations or
figures in a row). But I'm the kind of person that tries to read, correct and
polish what I wrote two or three times. So, in my case, even if I might write
a long burst of text in insert mode without escaping, I still go back and make
changes later on.

So I'm maybe not the kind of user that you are trying to set up Vim for. Even
then, I would still try to find a way to go quickly to normal mode, and then do
movements there. There are many ways to make returning to normal mode faster.
I have mapped "jj" and "kk" to behave like <Esc> in insert mode, and some
people like to use "jk" or some key pressed with CTRL.

Then, in normal mode, you can move back very easily with "b" or "h". I like
this more than a press and hold key with CTRL.

One last detail that I forgot in the other email: by default, Vim will not
undo every keystroke that you added in insert mode. That's another good reason
to go to normal mode once in a while.

A nice suggestion for your use case (that is useful both if you want to avoid
normal mode or you use it often) is mapping <Space> to <C-g>u<Space>.
Something like:

inoremap <Space> <C-g>u<Space>

That has no visible effect at all on each white space, but adds an "undo break"
each time you press that key. That will make possible that Vim undoes words
separated by spaces.

Good luck!

--
Alex (a.k.a. suy) | GPG ID 0x0B8B0BC2
http://barnacity.net/ | http://disperso.net

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