Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!texsun!letni!mic!convex!convex.COM From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Newsgroups: comp.editors Subject: Re: vi for power users Message-ID: <110093@convex.convex.com> Date: 9 Dec 90 04:23:47 GMT References: <109909@convex.convex.com> <1990Dec08.200418.6663@chinet.chi.il.us> Sender: usenet@convex.com Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX Lines: 30 In article <1990Dec08.200418.6663@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes: >Can anyone apply? Here's mine: >1) What is a quick and portable way to reform a paragraph? Macro solutions >preferred since most of the machines I use don't have fmt and the ones that >have nroff are two slow to use it. A macro involving a pipe to awk might >work if it can't be done internally. If you don't have fmt, it's your vendor's fault, and yours, since the source is available on uunet. Get it. >2) How do you manipulate arbitrary rectangles of text (copy/delete/move)? >Ideally you should only have to position the cursor to the corners to >delimit the range. (This is trivial on almost all PC wordprocessing >programs these days...). No, that's not built-in to the program. What's the application? If you just want to swap or delete fields or columns around on the same lines, you could easily do it from within vi itself. (Although it might be more conveniently expressed using a more general-purpose tool.) Just because everything is built-in to a PC program doesn't mean you should do it that way in UNIX. The very *VERY* few times I've wanted to do something not on the same line, it takes me maybe 15 seconds of programming in sed, cut, awk, or perl does the trick. Show me the kind of problem you mean. --tom -- Tom Christiansen tchrist@convex.com convex!tchrist "With a kernel dive, all things are possible, but it sure makes it hard to look at yourself in the mirror the next morning." -me