Emacs or Vi? Why the answer is neither.

[Tobias Pankrath]

On Monday, 14 May 2012 at 11:34:22 UTC, Thomas Mader wrote:
> On Thursday, 26 April 2012 at 17:00:25 UTC, David Nadlinger 
> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 25 April 2012 at 23:54:23 UTC, Ary Manzana wrote:
>>> Many people have the shortcut jj as an alternative to Esc. 
>>> You never move your hand from the keyboard. :-P
>>
>> Or the caps lock key, which I personally use. Can't believe 
>> how I managed to survive for years without rebinding it… ;)
>>
>> David
>
> I would be interested in your key bindings in general. In my 
> opinion many of the keybindings are very uncomfortable with a 
> german keyboard layout do you use another layout? (I know you 
> are from Austria because of your website. I am too)
> Do you use vim for D programming?
>
> Thomas

There is no vim vs IDE, because QtCreator works well (at least 
for C++) and has an awesome vim mode. You get the shortcuts from 
IDE (like commenting, searching for a function in the hole 
project by name etc, refactoring, etc) and the vim commandos. I 
use different editors and IDEs, but a vi-mode is a must have for 
me.

If you need a german keyboard layout* you need 
www.neo-layout.org. You'll have to spend ~3 weeks to learn it and 
it is worth it.

Some highlights:

you get arrowkeys, enter, pageup, pagedown, tab, backspace and a 
full numblock on Mod4. That means that you can do basic movements 
without leaving your current
vi mode :-) The arrowkeys reside directly under your left hand on 
ESDF. That's even the same I use for playing games.
And these keys tend to change their position between different 
keyboards. Now they have a fixed position.

you get most characters commonly used for programming on your 
homerow:
\/{}*?()-:@

So I can insert {} with CAPSLOCK (the Mod3) + 'd' or 'f'. I still 
can type QWERTZ with reasonable speed, but I can't stand 
programming with QWERTZ anymore.

All alphabetical characters are rearranged. That's makes this 
layout harder to learn, but much much easier to type. I recommend 
to take the time and learn it, however if you can't or don't want 
to afford it, you could leave the position of the alphabetical 
characters (MOD1 and MOD2) basically untouched and integrate 
MODX, x >= 3 into QWERTZ. It would still be a really good layout 
for programming.