The "loop and a half"

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Sun, 8 Oct 2017 12:49 am, bartc wrote:

> On 07/10/2017 14:19, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
>> On Sat, 7 Oct 2017 11:06 pm, bartc wrote:
> 
>> Ctrl-K to enter "operate on selected text" mode;
>> Y to Delete
>> Ctrl-K to enter "operate on selected text" mode;
>> R to Read from a file (at last an actual mnemonic command!)
>> enter a file name
>> 
>> That's five steps.
> 
> Are we counting steps or keystrokes?

Steps. If I was counting keystrokes, entering the filename "file" would have
counted as five. It didn't.


>> And now you have two "temporary" files, file and file2, which need to be
>> deleted. Two more steps that you conveniently don't count.
> 
> Actually I keep a set of 9 scratch file names just for such purposes.

So that's yet another thing for you to memorise rather than Ctrl-D for EOF.

Bart, its cool that you have your own personal, idiosyncratic way of working
that suits you. (I'm not being sarcastic.) If it works for you, great. Nobody
says you have to change your own personal workflow. You've got a bunch of
personal habits and customised tools that do just what you want them to do
and how YOU want them to do, and that's great for you. We accept that.

Please have the decency to return the favour.

Just because other people follow a different workflow and use tools that make
other choices than yours, doesn't make them wrong, and it doesn't make those
other tools substandard.

You're old enough and supposedly mature enough that you ought to know that
before you criticise a technical solution, you should at least try to
understand what problem it is solving before deciding it is wrong.


[...]
>> And you think that memorising these non-standard keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-KW
>> Ctrl-KY Ctrl-KR
> 
> I believe these used to be WordStar commands, if anyone can remember that.

Never used it, but I remember when WordPerfect for Mac came with a keyboard
overlay with WordStar commands on it.

But WordStar or not, you still have to memorise a bunch of commands to get a
task done, commands which don't work anywhere else. You're happy to do it,
which is great. Vim and Emacs users make the same choice, to memorise many
special, idiosyncratic ways of working in a text editor which don't apply
anywhere else. We don't judge: some people love Vim, some love Emacs, some
prefer lightweight GUI editors, some use heavy-duty IDEs.



>> [...]
>>> However, how hard would it for the editor to do its own sorting?
>> 
>> Yes, it is a mystery to me why so few editors include a "sort lines"
>> function.
> 
> I don't know if you're being sarcastic here or not, so I don't know if
> you mean few editors have 'sort' or most of them do. Neither do I get
> the point you're making.

I'm not being sarcastic, and I'm agreeing with you.

Sorting a few lines is not a hard task, and yet not one of my GUI editors have
it as either a built-in command or even a default plug-in. (There may be
third-party plugins I don't know of.)

I daresay that Emacs, at least, will have a sort command, but as they say
about Emacs, it would be the perfect operating system if only its standard
text editor wasn't so bad.

(Hey, just because I respect the right of people to choose Emacs, doesn't mean
I can't make fun of its size and bloatedness.)



-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.