[plug] Vi cheat sheet

[ryan at is.as.geeky.as]

On Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 01:09:05PM +0800, Brad Campbell wrote:
> I mean seriously.. what were they smoking when they wrote this thing?
> Give me wordstar any day of the week :p)
> 
> Actually, I have had to finally learn vi.
> Ever since I started using it, debian has had "ae" which had a command set
> that sort of made sense to me. As of Woody it appears to be gone. So vi it
> is.

[warning - irrelevant experiences with vim below]

I used to be an ae person about 4 months ago and vi(m) scared me.  Then 
I sat down one day at work, downloaded heaps of vim command sheets and 
forced myself to read and try out every command I could find.  The
primary reason i tried it was to locate specific line numbers in Perl
code, ae couldn't help me there (from what I could find).

Since that day it took me about 2 weeks of steady Perl editing 
(vim provides syntax highlighting, brace balancing,etc) and now 
I can't use anything else.  I find the multiple windows especially 
useful when I do Perl CGI using HTML::Template and need to be editing 2+ 
files at once.  I'm writing this email in vim too.

The only side-effect is that I can no longer comprehend Perl code that
is not all pretty colours :)  (Though some would argue Perl code is never
comprehendable)

In the past I missed the block (^@ ^W ^Y) functions of ae, but once you 
learn about the visual mode in vim you'll happily convert :)

You can see why they chose all the commands as they did once you start 
using it a bit.  They actually make a LOT more sence than ae shortcuts 
(though I was cursing the first few days)

Ryan