Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Low level vs. high level UI

[Dustin Sallings]

On Feb 25, 2004, at 15:33, Pierce T.Wetter III wrote:

>  Ok, so since you both used vi/vim, I'd have to say that tla is
> not at that point yet.
>
>  First off, vi has levels of interface. When I first started learning 
> vi, I
> learned the following commands:

        [basic commands]

	I think tla has this as well.  *most* of the time, I do replay, log, 
and commit.  (and I usually do a changes and tree-lint as part of my 
commit just because I like making sure I'm doing what I think I'm 
doing).

	There's also add, I suppose, but if you use taglines, that's a bit 
less important.  Some of my auto-fill templates in vim already add 
arch-tags, and I'm a \at away from having one in the templates that 
don't.

	I think this goes back to the document describing the collection of 
basic commands.  For most of my day-to-day tasks, it doesn't feel much 
different from the way I dealt with CVS.  Importing is more complicated 
than adding, but you do it less frequently.  Really uncommon things 
just have to be looked up, but there's enough stuff in the tla bin for 
me to find my way around.

> So there was a ramp up in necessary knowledge. The great thing about 
> vi to me is that it supports some powerful methods of combining simple 
> commands into complex ones.
>
> I still prefer a gui editor though. Arch seems more like emacs to me 
> then vi, and I've never bothered to learn emacs despite its power 
> because the amount of stuff I had to learn (and remember) to useful 
> work was too large.

	I don't think emacs is that different from vim, just a lot bigger.  
Emacs is very foreign to me, but I can usually do a M-x 
thing-i-want-to-do and it walks me through it.  If I do something 
frequently enough, it's usually either bound to a key, or I can bind it 
to a key.

	Same thing here.  There were a couple of multi-step things I did 
frequently enough that I wrote a script to do them.  I found myself 
wrapping ``:.!uuidgen'' in a comment for an arch-tag frequently enough 
that I wrote a couple of vim functions to do it.

--
Dustin Sallings