Text Editor Fu

I enjoyed reading "Staying the hell out of insert mode". I have to concur with the author of this article: insert mode is not the most powerful mode in vi.

I don't claim to be some sort of text editing guru or anything. In my career I've met some people who can do some awesome things with their text editor. I always like learning new tricks and techniques.

Getting back to the article that I mentioned above, for me, the reason why insert mode in vi isn't the most powerful mode in vi is because in command mode you can do things like

'c,.!perl -pe 's/foo/bar/'

...and, if you know anything at all about me, you know that I have a thing for Perl one-liners...

I'm not really a heavy-duty vi user though. I'm more of an XEmacs user. In Emacs/XEmacs, you'd type something more like:

C-u M-| perl -pe 's/foo/bar/'

The one person who reads this blog might be wondering "why not use the natural capabilities of the text editor itself to do transformations like this?". To this I pretty much have to shrug and respond "this works for me". It is probably safe to say that a huge percentage of the code I have ever produced in my life has been produced through keystrokes that start with "C-u M-|".

Basically, I am lazy and I would rather let the computer do the typing for me...

Mad Marble Madness Skillz

Holy crap. Watch this person play Marble Madness:



Marble Madness was one of the few games I ever played with any regularity when I was a kid. I played the Amiga version a fair bit and I thought I was pretty good at it. I played quite a few "perfect" games at the hardest level and I was pretty quick too.

If I thought I was good at Marble Madness, all I need to do is to look at this video to understand very clearly that there are people out there who were/are a lot better at it than I ever was.

War is Hell....and only costs a quarter to play.