The Modernization of Emacs

[Evan Klitzke]

On 6/20/07, Martin Gregorie <martin at see.sig.for.address> wrote:
> Amongst its benefits are that you can do anything its capable of by
> using only a standard QUERTY keyboard plus ESC - no function keys, etc
> are needed - which can save your bacon if somebody misconfigured your
> console or the computer is dieing.

While it is true that the original incarnation of vi only uses the
"regular" keyboard keys and the escape key, to make vi not painful to
use there are a whole slew of commands that have been added in vim and
other vi clones to add basic features, and many of these commands use
Ctrl (or some other function key). For example, the original vi lacks
a redo command (!), and consequently the redo command sequence in vim
is Ctrl-r.  I don't think nearly as many people would use vi if none
of the Ctrl sequence commands present on modern versions of vi were
available due to the lack of features like this one.

-- 
Evan Klitzke <evan at yelp.com>