OneAndOneIs2

I've mentioned before I've had some negative feedback about things I've written.

As any regular readers will know, I generally ignore utterly the trolls & flamers, but have devoted large amounts of time & text to expanding upon points that people felt were not sufficiently clear.

I'm going to break with that trend, courtesy of a link supplied by Pat of LinuxColumbus: A post by Mr. Greg Deckler on his PC Pipeline blog. Because frankly, this cracked me up :o)

Mr. Deckler has, like numerous others, been able to miss every point that's actually made in the article in question, in order to fit them into his own prejudices & preconceptions. That's nothing noteworthy: Lots of people are that moronic.

But he's then gone on to try and prove his point by taking issue with my example of the text editor Vi as being "more friendly" than any MS equivalent because it requires much less work to do the same tasks.

The example I give is using Vi to move 5 lines of text to the end of the document, accomplished by typing "d5dGp"

Mr. Deckler takes issue with this:

Not to mention that fact that he DOESN'T EVEN GET THE PROCESS RIGHT!!!

In vi (really):
- ESC
- :d5d
- ENTER
- :Shift-g
- ENTER
- :p

If you don't hit the ESC key, you could just end up typing "d5d G p" into your document. Also, the ENTER key is REQUIRED in order to actually execute your commands. You ALSO need to enter the ":" before your commands to actually get you into command entry mode.

I'll grant him the "Esc" may sometimes be necessary at the start. Fair enough.

Now, let's look at the rest. Colons & ENTERs abound in his version. Is he right?

Well, let's try it: Even if you don't know vi at all, fire it up. Now type 10iLine Of Text[enter][esc]

You now have ten lines of text. Now type 1G to go back to the top of the screen, and let's try my own method:

d5d - deletes five lines
G - moves me to the end of the document
p - pastes the deleted five lines

Hmm. Seems to have worked flawlessly for me. . .

Press 'u' twice to undo everything, and let's try Greggy's approach:

:d5d[enter] - Error 488: Trailing characters
:G[enter] - Error 492: Not an editor command
:p - nothing seems to happen.

Oh dear. Despite his overbearing condescension, it appears that Mr. Deckler doesn't have a clue how to use Vi, doesn't it?

Perhaps he has a saving grace with his next point?

Now, if this wasn't bad enough, the author also conveniently forgets to mention Word's macro capabilities, which would allow you to assign all of the above Word commands to a macro with a key sequence of something like "Ctrl- ", or whatever your heart's desire.

Sadly, it appears not. Certainly, if one were infallibly psychic, one could set up a macro to perform such tasks before they're used, but sadly, most of us don't know what we're going to need to do so far in advance.

But hey, let's examine making a macro to do this task, shall we? We'll have to presuppose that no VB skills exist in the end-user - We're not writing examples for programmers, this is Windows!

So, let's set up Word to move 5 lines of text to the end of the document at the touch of, say, F2. Here are the keystrokes:

Alt-T, M, R, Alt-K, F2, Mouse-click, Ctrl-Alt-Down, Ctrl-Alt-Down, Ctrl-Alt-Down, Ctrl-Alt-Down, Ctrl-Alt-Down, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-End, Ctrl-V, Mouse-click

Pause for breath and let's examine the Vi way of doing the same thing, via the mapping utility that Mr. Deckler apparently knows nothing about.

To make Vi move 5 lines to the end at the push of F2, you type:

:map <F2> d5dGp[enter]

Hmm. So, Word vs. Vi when automation is allowed makes for less typing in Word, does it. . ?

It takes only very common imbecility to miss every point in a document - most every anonymous web troll you'll ever meet has that.

But trying to make yourslf look clever by replacing a flawless instruction set with one that shows only that you are utterly ignorant of the software in question?

And then trying to seem even more dazzling by showing yourself utterly ignorant of the scintillatingly elegant and simple automation functionality of Vi by hyping Word's grotesquely over-complex macro-creation process?

That truly is a genuinely special kind of stupid.

For Mr. Deckler's sake, let's hope his salary and position as SysAdmin aren't determined by an employer conversant with Vi who reads his blog.