🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Z8U84BL@math.fu-berlin.de> wolff@inf.fu-berlin.de (Thomas Wolff) writes:
>Most repliers to my posting seem to be that well accustomed to the fact 
>that vi is a line editor that they didn't see my point when I wrote 
>"arbitrary (!) block of text" (well, maybe "block" was misleading). This 
>is not a block of lines (which is the unit of most vi operations) and 
>since I referred to "elementary text editing tasks" I didn't mean columns 
>either. Suppose I have the lines
>	word1 word2 word1
>	word3 word4 word3
>and I need the text from "word2 " up to "word4" (assume it's a sentence) 
>to be copied or moved elsewhere.If an editor cannot do this with a 
>simple command sequence (and without the search trick burdening me with 
>the task of counting the occurences of the word following my sentence 
>within my sentence, if it can be done that way at all), I just do not 
>call it a text editor.
>Have a nice week-end.
>Thomas
>wolff@inf.fu-berlin.de




This is easily done by first moving the cursor to the beginning of
word2, type mx (where x can be any character), then move the cursor to
the end of word4, type y`x to yank the block. Now you move the cursor
to the place you want to put and type p. Is that easy? I learned this
not very long ago.  As for dealing with blocks, Maurice can even tell
you how to move the block (a real rectangle)
        word2 word1
        word4 word3
to some place you like to put them. Isn't that amazing? I know no
editor which can do this. BTW, Maurice, do you mind to post that little
program mxy to the net? I find it very useful.

I just begin to really appreciate the usefulness of vi, thanks for the
help from this news group. This is probably a good chance for me to
thank those who helped me in the past. In fact, vi can do much more
things than one can think about. You really have to work with it to
appreciate. I used to work with many editors. For me, vi is the one to
stay. Well, everybody has his/her own taste. That's how we are made
of.


Zheng Chen

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Zheng Chen
zchen@phys.ksu.edu