[geeks] VIM color schemes

[Mike Parson]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2004 at 11:41:50AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2004 at 11:23:50AM -0500, Mike Parson wrote:
>> I've never been able to get my head around the colored text of vim,
>> or emacs.  I've always liked editing in black and white.
>
> I like it mostly for HTML editing, because it catches missing
> brackets, tags, etc.  For emails and such, I don't care for it.

Yeah, I guess that can have it's uses.  About the only time I fire up
vim these days is if I've got to edit a really big file, nvi will try
and read the whole thing, vim will just load what's needed to do what
you want to do.  In those cases, vim is much faster, and depending on
the size of the file, might be the only way to do it.

> (I spent way too much time in Turbo Pascal's IDE back in the day..)
>
>> For that matter, I don't really like vim either.  The vi I learned on
>> was good ole BSD vi (now nvi).  The key-bindings and some behaviors
>> in vim that I rely on in nvi are just different enough to make me get
>> very cranky.
>
> I used "normal" vi up until a couple of months ago, when I had a
> machine fast enough to fire up vim without a perceptible speed
> difference from starting up "normal" vi.

It's never been a speed thing for me, except for where I noted above,
and then vim was the winner.  For me, I expect certain keystrokes to do
certain things, and with vim, some of them are different.  The biggest
one that bites me every time is the way the different flavors handle
undo.  With 'real' vi, 'u' undo's, a second 'u' will undo your undo
(redo).  But vim will keep undo-ing till the file looks they way it did
when you opened it up, or last saved.  This can be very annoying.  If
I want to repeat the last command, I hit '.'. Be it for 'u,' 'dd,' or
whatever.

I've also never found vim's equiv to vi's % (jump to matching
paren/brace).  I'm sure it's there somewhere, but it's different from
vi, which means I have to switch modes when I'm in an editor that claims
to be based on the one my fingers are trained to deal with.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org