Friday, July 29, 2011

Re: Vim wishes (was: A modern look for gvim (win32))

On Jul 28, 5:33 pm, Tim Chase <v...@tim.thechases.com> wrote:
> On 07/28/2011 04:23 PM, AK wrote:
>
> > If backwards compatibility was not an issue at all, what would
> > be changed in vim?
>
> I think my biggest ones (that occur to me without profound
> consideration) are actually pretty minor:
>
> 1) that {count}>{motion} and {count}<{motion} would shift by
> {count} 'shiftwidth's instead of act as a multiplier for
> {motion}.  It happens to work as I expect/want in Visual mode, it
> just behaves differently in normal mode.  I'd like to be able to type
>
>    3>2j
>
> to indent this-and-the-next-two-lines by 3 'shiftwidth's instead
> of indent 6 lines by one 'sw'; or have
>
>    3>}
>
> indent the through the end of the paragraph by 3 'sw' instead of
> indenting 3} by one 'sw'.
>
> 2) that the "a"/outer quotation text-objects had a way to delete
> the quotes but not the surrounding space(s).  There have been a
> number of times where I have Python code like
>
>    foo = [
>      "my cursor in here",
>      "some other stuff",
>      ]
>
> and I want to change the string to a variable, so I type
>
>    ca"
>
> it strips the leading whitespace in addition to the quotes.
> Niggling, and easily i_CTRL-T'd back into place, but it would be
> nice to have a "just do the quotes and their contents, not the
> spaces" tweak.
>

You've hit on two of my biggest complaints about Vim here.

> 3) the definitions of 'paragraphs' are tightly tied to nroff
> macros.  There are times I'd like to be able to define these more
> broadly (HTML tags, Python def/class statements, etc).  Usually
> this involves much more complex mappings.
>

This is especially annoying when editing HTML. The same applies to the
definition of a sentence. I will often be editing HTML like:

<p>Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow.</p>

das on the second sentence also deletes the closing tag and every
closing tag after it until the unconfigurable definition of a
"sentence" is reached.

On my TODO list is to figure out a way to make a closing HTML tag also
end a paragraph, if that's possible. I see that and end of paragraph
or end of section also ends a section.

> 4) a couple times, I've wished for true vi ":open" mode.
>
>    :help :open
>
> This is less significant since I changed jobs a while back (Vim
> redraw didn't work well on an old Dos-based Epson hand-held, so I
> fell back to using nvi or stevie).
>
> Most of my other annoyances are "the default for the setting that
> controls $THING doesn't default *my* way" which is a pretty petty
> gripe since Vim offers the functionality I want if I turn it on.
>
> -tim

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