Saturday, September 4, 2010

OpenSuse snafu resolved - need standard minimum

After some emails back and forth between me and Tony Mechelynck
who first commented that OpenSuse had an autocmd and nomodeline
the answer to getting rid of the shoving the cursor down to the bottom
on re-entry into a previous buffer is revealed.  It is the autocmd that is
doing it.  As far as the nomodeline is concerned, it seems to me that
Ubuntu would be the one that needs it since root has no login ability
there.  That is a design snafu (only using sudo - you cannot login as
root on the console) they will come to regret when malware moves into
normal user accounts.  The best way to get rid of it is to login as root
to fix the damage.

The solution is to comment out the autocmd.  But this argues for
the people in this user list and Bram to dictate what should be in
the /etc virmc files (they are in the /etc/vimrc folder on Ubuntu). I
would say the minimal amount is an optimal solution.  Fedora at
one time had auto-wrap turned on if the file name had a ".txt"
extension.  At first I thought it was what Bram had decided was
appropriate.  It drove me nuts and I finally deleted it.  But this cursor
being shoved to the bottom of the window made it impossible to edit
and compare two very similar files until I added the buffer function key
macros with a zz at the end of the macro. Once that was done some
sanity was restored.  IMHO, Bram with consultation of the Vim gurus
in this user list needs to reduce these heresies to zero.  I don't want
the behavior to be different from one Linux distro to the next when the
user either has no .vimrc file or if they do have one it has zero length.
It has got to the point that I am using my .vimrc to add the precious
few alterations I provide but far more are things I am using to reduce
or eliminate this cross platform chaos.

I can tolerate a slight difference on Windows due to the nature of the
beast but even there the change needs to be only what is necessary.
Until now I shifted back and forth between using a little race horse editor
called MicroEMACS and vim depending on what I was doing.  If I was
using ad-hoc macros I would use MicroEMACS since they ran infinitely
quicker. But termcap is gone now on OpenSuse and after comparing
the slow vim ad-hoc macro (compared to MicroEMACS) capabilities to
the glacially slow emacs macros I shifted to using vim for all normal
editor chores.

I will have some comments on this and lot of other stuff in just
a few days here:

http://www.securemecca.com/public/VimStandard.txt

Basically, this:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2bv5pwc

has turned up the time-line for when I say people need to say
goodbye to Windows.  But to do it we need some standardizing
first.

Browsers:
Chrome, Firefox, or Opera (alpha order)

Editors:
OpenOffice
vim (consistent base standard across all platforms and distros)
emacs (ditto)

People don't have time for personal preference changes due to
some distro authors who think this wham doozle way of doing
things is something everybody should want.  If they want to do
it, have them put them in the skeleton .vimrc files but commented
out so people can make their own decisions on whether it is
appropriate for them.  Personally, I don't want vim history and
always use "-i NONE".  But I don't think most people would share
that viewpoint.  It is just that every time I edit a file I edited before I
am almost never doing the same thing.  Having vim going to
where I was at rather than clean state is not what I want.  But
in general I don't much of history in anything except for a
temporary basis for BASH in an xterm.

There is more to this than just the standardizing of vim, but
lets start there, okay?

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