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Discussion on: "My First Two Weeks Using VIM"

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STrRedWolf

There's one thing to remember about using vi (and by extension, vim):

It's designed for brain-damaged terminals.

Seriously. There's three types of terminals:

  • Normal, where you can use Emacs or even something lighter like joe or nano. See: DEC's VT-52, VT-100, xterm, linux console, ANSI in Windows, etc...
  • Brain-damaged, where there's always some quirk and it's just barely capable if you work around it. See: Wyse 50.
  • Brain-dead, where you might as well be typing into a typewriter. See: "dumb" terminal emulation, any line printer, etc...

I classify the Wyse 50 as brain damaged, because you do not have a non-destructive way of moving left or right. You got backspace and space. Nothing else to move left or right on a line. That's something you need for Emacs, joe, nano... most every text editor out there for the console...

...except vi, which has separate command/text entry modes for this type of damage, and ed, which is a straight line editor (which is a different type of hell shared by MS-DOS's EDLIN).

The funny thing about it, vi is always available on every Unix distro...