1 hour ago · Tech · hide · 0 comments

A Mastodon post by computer scientist David Chisnall has a very Unsung opener: I have used vim since around 2000. I have written five books, a PhD thesis, a few dozen papers and over 150 articles with it. At this point, my higher brain functions are not engaged at all when I use a bunch of common vim commands, they just happen. Documents I wrote with anything else have random :w in the middle. Chisnall goes on to talk about one specific vim feature: Persistent undo is one of my favourite features of vim. […] I don’t often need the persistent undo. But on the few occasions when I have needed it, it’s been invaluable: ooops, I deleted something from this file, maybe last week and one reboot ago, what was it? Undo until I find it, copy it, paste it into the current version. Or, a bit more commonly: I had this working, then I tidied it up ready to commit, now it isn’t working, what did I do? Vim has kept this working across major version upgrades over a period of about 20 years. I don’t…

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