Muscle Memory

Unix aficionados, especially back in the day, fell into one of two camps, depending on which text editor they preferred: vi or emacs. Emacs was fancier in that it was programmable and customizable, while vi was simply a very powerful, but tersely obfuscated (or so I thought at the time), editor. I was a vi fan; never used emacs.

As I'm installing drupal, I find myself back in the Unix command line and I'm amazed at how quickly the fingers remember what's what.

I start the editor and view a large document file. Instantly, my fingers go to CTRL-d for page down (CTRL-U is page up). The fingers also remember h, j, k, and l, the commands to move the cursor left, up, down, and right respectively.

O inserts a line under the current line, $ moves me to the end of the current line, a appends at the current spot, and A appends at the end of the current line.

It's both bizarre and a testament to how efficiently vi's interface was that one can just re-remember these long forgotten commands. I was surprised to find it was just like riding a bike. VI was one of the hardest programs I learned how to use because it required you to become an expert user - or keep with you a list of VI commands like the one below.

By the way, if you're wondering the significance of the dog cartoon... that cartoon (from the New Yorker) was hanging on the door of the Unix system administrator's office during my tenure as an undergraduate at Ball State. I didn't search for it, it just came up, so there must be some cosmic relationship between it and VI.