Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 11:28:34 -0700 (PDT) From: Gary Kline <kline@tera.com> To: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva) Cc: kline@tera.com, doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: vi tutorial Message-ID: <199609051828.LAA09137@athena.tera.com> In-Reply-To: <199609051126.GAA09077@bonkers.taronga.com> from Peter da Silva at "Sep 5, 96 06:26:38 am"
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According to Peter da Silva: > > Enclosed is the vi_tutorial that I've been distributing. > > Mind if I make a couple of suggestions? They're pretty deep changes, > but I think are important to really understanding VI. You have almost > certainly internalized these pieces of information, but you haven't > concretized them, perhaps. > > First: drop all mention of "insert mode" and "command mode". Why? > Because "insert mode" doesn't really act like a "mode". It acts like > a "command". If people think of an insertion operation (i, a, o, and > so on) as being a command "itexttexttext^[" then things that just > seemed like quirks of vi suddenly make a lot of sense. I think the reason that the original authors of the helpfile used `mode' was that Bill Joy and Mark Horton used the term when they published their original paper on vi. ---I remember Bill giving me a copy of the paper and learning enough more from it to help bring me much further along 15, 16, 17 or however many years ago it was. At least 16.--- At any rate, following that early tutorial, I stuck with `mode'. > > Second: don't dwell so early on the shortcut commands. Teach the > basic moves and combinations (dw, cw, and so on) and then mention > things like "ZZ" and "~" as asides. If you learn the basic command > structure before even seeing the shortcuts and special cases it'll > really be a lot easier. > > (also, ZZ is a shortcut for :x^M not :wq^M) > Good point about the `ZZ' stuff. Since the purpose of my submitted tutorial is to allow entirely new users to use vi with minimal functionality, I didn't expand very much upon the original structure. If you've read my html version, I give pointers to the early paper and suggest that the user read any of the myriad Unix tutorials type books that cover vi. ---Or perhaps this one can be expanded to be a basic vi-tutorial. Feedback from the documentation folks, please. gary >
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