Re: [9fans] Guide to using Acme effectively?

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Wed, 1 Jul 2009 13:58:19 -0700
David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:
>
> > Arguing about mouse vs keyboard misses the point.
> > I'm very happy with acme's use of the mouse, but
> > acme's power comes from the rest of its design.
> >
> > Russ
> >
> >
> Even in Emacs, I use the mouse because pointing the insertion point or
> cursor or whatever to where I need to type next is *much* faster than many
> repetitions of a keypress a lot of the time.

Me too, I require vi with X or Xterm mouse support. :) The mouse is not faster than vi's beginning/end of paragraph operations though, nor being able to set or goto "marks" with just 2 keypresses. Then there's "find matching bracket" which can be invaluable depending on language, goto beginning/end of sentence which is great when you've just typed something really stupid in your human-language narrative. There's the vi way of facilitating deletion or changing text in a region defined by any cursor motion, that can be hugely faster than select+delete with the mouse.

I'm not saying vi is brilliant. Apart from the features listed above it has many which require more effort to recall than they're worth. It's idea of requiring the cursor to be on a character is obstructive, as are some of the features designed around that.


--
Ethan Grammatikidis

Those who are slower at parsing information must
necessarily be faster at problem-solving.