Editing with mg
===============
Last edited: $Date: 2021/03/23 20:25:08 $
Avid Vi(m) user
---------------
I have been using Vi and Vim for more than two
decades, for most of the stuff I write.
Also for official office documents, like management
memo's and management reports I use Vi or Vim as
much as possible. I write these either in LaTeX or
in Markdown. Markdown I convert with Pandoc to
LaTeX.
After this, pdflatex creates a beautiful PDF from
the LaTeX file.
I use Vim to write my email messages with Mutt, to
write shell scripts, Perl scripts and so on.
During my workday I have a lot of meetings and for
all those meetings I keep notes. For this I use
Vimwiki.
All in all I guess that I spend at least six hours
per day in Vi and in Vim.The Vi and Vim keys are
engraved in my muscle memory, and I issue most edit
commands automatically, without thinking about it.
Using ed
--------
In 2018 I discovered ed and decided to invest time
in it. So I looked up the most important commands
and started using ed, learning on the go.
I realised that I could only really learn how to use
ed by actually using it. To do this, I set ed as my
editor in w3m and started using this for editing my
personal wiki. Also I used ed to edit my dotfiles
and other config files (like fstab, pf.conf and so
on).
Today, I use ed almost daily for many small editing
tasks. Also I use ed with heredocuments in scripts
more and more.
Emacs
-----
During these last two decades I have occasionally
looked at Emacs. Org mode looks awesome and there
are many things one can run inside Emacs. And every
time I got scared by the keybindings.
I have tried Viper mode and I have tried Evil mode.
Both seems promising at the first glance, but when I
started doing real work, I discovered there are
still some issues with these modes. Of course, many
have been solved. But still, things like rec-mode
(for recutils files) are not working fine with evil
mode.
Also I discovered that some things are really much
nicer in Emacs. Extensions like rec-mode and ledger-
mode are much nicer than the Vim plugins for
recutils and ledger-cli. And org mode really does
has a lot more to offer than Vimwiki.
What I also like is that Emacs can be used as a REPL
for Forth and for Lisp.
As I have come to see it, Vi and Vim are editors,
while Emacs is more a platform to run many other
things.
So, I decided to take the plunge and jumped straight
into Emacs, without viper or evil mode.
Now, I am trying to learn using Emacs with the
default keybindings. I have an old O'Reilly book
"Learning GNU Emacs from 1996, and the chapter
"Customizing Emacs" starts on page 299. The authors,
Debra Cameron, Bill Rosenblau and Eric Raymond,
clearly thought that one shouldn't start with
customized settings, and who am I to disagree?
I really have to unlearn to use Esc so often, and
things like "cw" during editing existing text, and
so on.
mg
--
During an email conversation about all this, I was
advised to have a look at mg. This is small Emacs
like text editor using the Emacs key bindings.
I did some "research on the internet" (a.k.a. using
Google to see what comes up), installed mg and
started to play with it. With the install of mg
comes a great man page, which describes all the
default keybindings and the commands, so this is a
nice way to learn a lot.
So, here I am, writing this text in mg :)
Small is beautiful
------------------
I like the elegance of a very small editor, and
using the terminal, tmux and terminal applications.
It still feels very clumsy and awkward, but I
suppose this was the same when I started to learn Vi
in the nineties, and have become repressed memories.
I do think modal editing is very efficient and
nothing beats the dot command of vi (.).
My goal at the moment is not to replace using Vi,
Vim, and ed, but to use Emacs next to these, mostly
for those enhancements like org mode and all those
useful modes like rec-mode and ledger-mode, and
playing with Forth and Lisp.
I think that using mg is a nice way to getting used
to the Emacs way of editing and the default Emacs
key bindings.
Have fun!