Re:My Favorite Vim Oneliners for Text Manipulation
by fuzztester on Sunday August 06, 2023 @04:19AM
(#37019980)
>Vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, it has a button for moving in every direction
Actually vim is more like the Great Glass Elevator cum Excavator, because it has buttons and levers (to extend your simile) for moving in every direction and performing operations of every kind, and most importantly, all sorts of combinations of the two:
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018215
So, if tomorrow, either more movements or more operations were added to vim, they would automatically play well with the older ones.
This is orthogonality (1), and genius, IMO :)
(1) As they mean in microprocessor ISA design (, I think, not being a hardware guy, but have just read about it a little here and there, while doing assembly language programming years ago).
When I first switched to Colemak, around 2010, I remapped the movement keys so that they were in the same physical location as hjkl on qwerty.
Then I realised I'd lost compatibility with other readline based software. So I just learned to use the new, not particularly ergonomic, positions under Colemak.
At this point it's almost always from muscle memory now and couldn't tell you what I press half the time.
Vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, it has a button for moving in every direction and using it since the 90s has been like learning to play a musical instrument.