vim use in finland - keyboard/vim-speed relationship
Max Waterman
I've worked in the UK, US, China and now Finland. I'm a long time (since 1984) vi user, and it's been several years since I started using vim, gradually using more and more vim-specific features.
On my travels, I've met a few emacs users, but not too many (<10) and the majority seemed to use vi or some other graphical editor.
However, I am now working in Finland, and almost everyone I've met uses emacs. Furthermore, it seems no-one uses vi/vim, and they seem amazed that anyone would use vi/vim - they seem to absolutely hate it. I would have expected *some* to use it - I know there are a few, but vastly fewer than in other places I've been.
It was quite a shock, but only after a few months have I come up with a theory why this is, and this is my theory :
The keyboard.
I became used to a US keyboard in the US, but even going back to the UK on occasion, I find it quite easy to use vi. I have my own 'favourite' keyboard that I try to take with me everywhere, so I don't have to use a Finnish keyboard much; but I do have to sometimes, and I find that using vi is a pain on a Finnish keyboard.
At first, I thought it was just that I wasn't familiar with the keys in the different positions, but I notice that some keys I commonly use are much more awkward to use - for example, '/' is something like shirt-7.
On the other hand, many keys are quite similar, so I could well be wrong, but it made me at least consider it as a possibility.
Are there any studies on this sort of this? IE, frequency of key use in programming and the relationship between the most used keys and their positions on the various keyboards?
Max.
Tony Mechelynck
Well, I think it all depends what one would consider "easy". What are
typical Emacs-like keyboard commands? Ctrl-Shift-Alt-Q Ctrl-Alt-B
Shift-Alt-M Ctrl-Shift-G maybe? (I don't know Emacs) I wouldn't regard
that as "easier" than where some special keys are on my Belgian keyboard
(backslash between left-shift and W, vertical bar on the 1 key, atsign
on the 2 key, # on the 3 key, left brace on the 9 key, right brace on
the zero key, [ and ] on the two keys between P and the upper part of
the Enter key, all of them with AltGr). If the location of / and ? don't
please you, with Vim you can easily remap them to something else, ä and
ö maybe, or maybe ä and Ä which I suppose are on the same key with only
Shift making the difference. ;-)
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Personifiers Unite! You have nothing to lose but Mr. Dignity!
Teemu Likonen
> However, I am now working in Finland, and almost everyone I've met
> uses emacs. Furthermore, it seems no-one uses vi/vim, and they seem
> amazed that anyone would use vi/vim - they seem to absolutely hate it.
> I would have expected *some* to use it - I know there are a few, but
> vastly fewer than in other places I've been.
>
> It was quite a shock, but only after a few months have I come up with
> a theory why this is, and this is my theory :
>
> The keyboard.
I don't have any facts about which editor is more popular in Finland but
I'd guess that it's Vim. This is not much more than just a guess but I
think I have seen Vim discussed more in Finnish Linux communities. So my
experience is different from yours.
But about your point about the Finnish keyboard layout being
particularly difficult for Vi/Vim: I don't remember seeing this
discussed at all. OK, some Vim commands aren't exactly easy, like
AltGr+7 and AltGr+0 for "{" and "}" but I don't think the keyboard
explains much about the popularity.
I have used Vim for several years and never considered keyboard commands
difficult. I admit that is was quite late when I began to feel
comfortable with "{" and "}" commands but there are many other ways for
moving around in a document. Even though I have now switched to Emacs it
has nothing to do with keyboard commands. I feel comfortable with both
editors.
Teemu Likonen
> What are typical Emacs-like keyboard commands? Ctrl-Shift-Alt-Q
> Ctrl-Alt-B Shift-Alt-M Ctrl-Shift-G maybe? (I don't know Emacs)
Typical ones are more like
Ctrl+<letter>
Alt+<letter>
Ctrl+x <letter>
Marc Weber
> Are there any studies on this sort of this? IE, frequency of key use in
> programming and the relationship between the most used keys and their
> positions on the various keyboards?
Hi Max,
I don't think that the keyboard layout really does matter.
If you care you will learn how to remap keys and how to switch keyboard
layout. I've learned de (German), then switched to us because of / and
writing paths on linux. Now I'm writing in dvorak. Sure it was hard in
the beginning using different keys in vim. But you can learn it.
Maybe just ask them why they don't like vim and why they prefer emacs?
There are some things emacs does excellent. Eg it does take you less
than 30sec to google how to run a cdb or pdb debugger in emacs. How much
time do you have to spend on vim to do that?
The reason I've learned vim and not emacs was that I couldn't navigate
in emacs using c-f c-b c-n c-p. The cursor was never at the right place.
Using ctrl-u seemed insane. And to be honest grabbing scripts from
vim.org isn't the best experience either. But I'm working on improving
that. Although vim has some limitations .. I don't want to live without
it :-)
Marc Weber