🚀 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.

I think you are underestimating vi.  To copy or move a range, such as
the charcters from "word2" up to "word4" in your example:

1) move to the beginnning of the range
2) mark the position, say m
3) move the the end of the range
4a) To delete the range, do d`m   [That's a grave accent, not an apostrophe.]
4b) To yank the range, do y`m
4c) To copy the range, first yank or delete as needed, move to the
    desired place and do p.

Simple enough?

It's true that vi is not perfect, but it comes damn close.
You may want to learn vi first before becoming a critic.

>Have a nice week-end.
>Thomas
>wolff@inf.fu-berlin.de

You too.

--
Rouben Rostamian