'vi' is driving me crazy

[Michael Hipp]

Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-12-25 at 22:24, Michael Hipp wrote:
> 
>>Can anyone recommend a character-mode programmer's editor that works a bit 
>>more like a gui guy would expect?
>>
>>I'd never want to be one to complain, especially on a great day like this, but 
>>in between playing with new toys and stuffing myself on every manner of 
>>decadence, I'm trying to edit some moderately complex script files (bash). But 
>>the modality of vi and the lack of "standard" keystrokes for select, cut, 
>>copy, paste is making me looney.
> 
> 
> How about gvim? 

Thanks. But if I'm understanding what Google turned up, gvim is just a 
gui version of vim. And I'm already using vim since 'alias' shows this

   alias vi='vim'

If vim is "improved", I'm glad I'm not using the unimproved version.

The problem with vi is not one of knowing what mode I'm in, it says so 
at the bottom. The problem is having to constantly switch modes to do 
the most basic tasks (file save, search/replace, cut/copy/paste) and my 
fingers don't know about modes, they just want to type. Having to wait 
on my eyeballs to figure out what mode we're in is just never going to work.

I'm not looking for a gui editor. We have tons of those. I'm looking for 
a command-line (full screen character-cell) editor.

Thanks,
Michael