From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Newsgroups: fa.editor-p Title: too many editor commands Article-I.D.: ucb.1751 Posted: Thu Aug 12 01:48:51 1982 Received: Sat Aug 14 04:45:37 1982 >From npois!npoiv!harpo!eagle!mhtsa!allegra!psuvax!sibley@Berkeley Thu Aug 12 01:46:41 1982 Here is one problem with editors with too many commands. I remember being quite upset about vi when I was learning it for this reason. In vi all the common commands are single letters. It was quite easy to hit the wrong key and do something unexpected to my file. Usually I knew what key I had hit but often didn't know what it did. Sometimes "undo" would fix the problem, but sometimes not. It was very frustrating to be invoking commands I had not yet learned and sometimes time-consuming to get back to where I wanted to be (remember, I was a novice). Now that I am more familiar with vi I seem to make fewer typing mistakes. Perhaps learning the commands also taught me where they are on the keyboard or something. Anyway, it's no longer so much of a problem. Note that it is the fact that commands are single letters and that most letters correspond to a valid command that make this a problem. Normally, misspelling a keyword produces gobbledygook which is correctly diagnosed as a mistake. Dave Sibley Department of Mathematics Penn State University psuvax!sibley