Saturday, January 24, 2009

Because I Can!

___So, here I am, obviously without enough to fill my time (yeah right) and so I've come to the decision that I need to be able to do things faster, lots faster.
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___How, you might ask? I will need to learn VI and Dvorak.
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___I figure, added to my growing knowledge of UNIX, c and c++, this should allow me to do pretty much anything instantaneously. BTW, For those to whom VI means something along the lines of Virtual Intelligence or some such, VI, in this case is a high powered command line text editor. (As an interesting, albeit complex, side note: the name VI is derived from the abbreviation of the visual command in the EX line editor on which VI is built) As a further explanation to those who do not know about Dvorak, Dvorak is a keyboard layout created to improve typing efficiency by rearranging the positions of the letters on the keyboard. (ie: if you typed an "f" on a QWERTY keyboard, you would type a "u" on a Dvorak keyboard.)
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___What is truly cool about VI is the fact that it is run purely from the terminal. Want to make a new text file? Just type "vi filename" in any terminal window and VI will open in the terminal a new blank file name what ever "filename" you used. Finished editing and want to get back the the terminal? just type ":wq" and VI will write the file and exit, bringing back the terminal it was opened from. Even better, since VI comes standard on any UNIX machine (this would be a good time to note that Apple's OS X is UNIX based) you can use this editor without having to worry about having to install anything, ie. I can go to any school UNIX workstation (ie. any computer in the computer lab) and start using VI. Awesome!
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___Dvorak, on the other hand, puts all of the keys you use the most on the home row. (the row your fingers are resting on) This statistically improves efficiency by 8 to 20 times, and accuracy by 2 to 6 times. Pretty cool!
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___The only downside is the learning time. VI has around 40 different commands to memorize which, admittedly, you really only need to know about 15. And Dvorak takes a decent chunk of time to relearn how to type. The only silly thing is that if I plan on passing all of my classes this quarter this is probably my best bet. :)

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