Re: change inside

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Oct 27,  9:16am, shawn wilson wrote:
}
} thanks for the pointers. i'll look at what it'll take to script this
} out. however, (and i didn't ask this directly because i was unsure if
} there was just a feature i had missed) what is the general idea behind
} the vi mode in zsh? is this a feature that is meant to stay compatible
} with bash/tcsh/etc? or is this meant to bring as much of the vim
} command set as possible, but without being cumbersome into zsh?

The philosophy *was* to remain as close as possible to the ORIGINAL "vi"
and *avoid* any of the new features introduced by the slew of replacement
vi-like editors, only one of which at the time was vim.

Of course "new features" now means "features less than 20 years old" ...

I won't attempt to assert that this still *is* the philosophy, because
ever since zsh stopped being interesting as a project for university
computer science students to hack on, we've had a hard time finding
enough volunteer programmers to change much of anything, and vi mode in
the line editor is not something users have been clamoring about.  So
to that extent there's not much philosophy other than the overarching
zsh concept of "don't break anything that's been working for years."

I will say that vim is one of the reasons I became an emacs user.  The
whole point of vi, for me, was to create my own custom macros and attach
them to unused keystrokes; if my custom macros aren't loaded, I expect
those keystrokes to beep at me, not go off doing some new thing I have
no idea how to unwind because the undo action has been "improved".  I
don't think there's any such thing as an "unused keystroke" in vim, now.
Sigh, pardon the curmudgeonly rant, but "don't break anything ..."