Re: Commands from insert mode

On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 6:37 AM, Anthony Campbell <ac@acampbell.org.uk> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
> 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.

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.

c
--
Chris Lott <chris@chrislott.org>

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