From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Alexander Viro To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] text editor In-Reply-To: <20020426104534.356FA19988@mail.cse.psu.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 07:04:10 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 7b13bf8e-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Fri, 26 Apr 2002 nigel@9fs.org wrote: > As rog points out, if you don't want to watch the screen, you're not > using a visual editor. .... or at that moment you are looking at the other part of text. Or at the graph in another window. Or at the book on your table. > hjkl does solve the hand motion issue, but a strong reason for that Sorry. All other reasons aside, there is an issue with bandwidth of channels we can't change - eyes and fingers. And in quite a few situations that can become a scarce resource. So much that having half of output and large part of input bandwidth tied up whenever you need to change the location where you are editing text gets rather annoying. _Having_ the text on-screen in real-time is nice and often very useful. Being forced to follow the cursor, OTOH... To each his own. As I've said, I'm comfortable with vi on Unix boxen and with sam on Plan 9. Your mileage may vary. There are situations when mouse-intensive interface becomes a problem; if you don't have to deal with any of them - more power to you, but that doesn't make your preferences One True Way(tm).