C70:editor-people (08/12/82)
>From npois!npoiv!harpo!eagle!mhtsa!allegra!psuvax!sibley@Berkeley Thu Aug 12 01:46:41 1982
Here is one problem with editors with too many commands. I remember being
quite upset about vi when I was learning it for this reason. In vi all
the common commands are single letters. It was quite easy to hit the wrong
key and do something unexpected to my file. Usually I knew what key I had
hit but often didn't know what it did. Sometimes "undo" would fix the
problem, but sometimes not. It was very frustrating to be invoking
commands I had not yet learned and sometimes time-consuming to get back to
where I wanted to be (remember, I was a novice).
Now that I am more familiar with vi I seem to make fewer typing mistakes.
Perhaps learning the commands also taught me where they are on the
keyboard or something. Anyway, it's no longer so much of a problem.
Note that it is the fact that commands are single letters and that most
letters correspond to a valid command that make this a problem. Normally,
misspelling a keyword produces gobbledygook which is correctly diagnosed
as a mistake.
Dave Sibley
Department of Mathematics
Penn State University
psuvax!sibley