About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

(Finally!)

How to use vim, really

I'm an Emacs man myself. I've never really used vim at all, and I use vi only for crontabs and commit messages. I've always grasped in the abstract the potential advantages of its modal editing, but that's as far as it ever went.

Jonathan McPherson's site has a great introduction to using vim that opened my eyes. His explanations of vim's features offer just the right amount of detail. Most importantly he explains why particular commands are a good idea. Not explaining that is one of the classic failings of manpages -- and I suspect that the vi manpage is the beginning and end of many users' attempts to learn it. They learn about insert mode, command mode, loading and saving files, and that's about it. Luckily, those just happen to be the prerequisites for McPherson's tutorial. Clever fellow.

His most important bit of general advice:

In general, you want to spend as little of your time in vim's insert mode as possible, because in that mode it acts like a dumb editor. This is why most vim novices spend so much time in insert mode -- it makes vim easy to use. But vim's real power lies in command mode! You'll find that the better you know vim, the less time you will spend in insert mode.

I'll never be a full convert (I've sold my soul to TextMate, and in the shell I'm happy with Emacs), but I'm definitely going to pull up that page the next time I need to use vi.

:wq

Monday, January 9th, 2006
programming + tips
3 comments

• Comment from Robert Loomans, later that day

If you want to use emacs for commit messages and crontab editing, then set the EDITOR environment variable.

For bash:

export EDITOR=emacs

and add it toyour shell startup scripts.

For bash:

echo 'export EDITOR=emacs' >>.bash_profile

• Comment from Paul, later that day

Oh, I know -- but thanks!

I've often left my $EDITOR as vi just to make sure I am forced to use it once in a while -- figuring that some dark day I'd be on a box with no Emacs and would be mighty embarassed not to remember how to make simple edits.

• Comment from Faried Nawaz, 1 week later

Even better -- set EDITOR and VISUAL to "emacsclient", and start gnuserv inside a running emacs process.

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