dive into mark

Paul Novarese: Using Emacs is a plonkable offense. I only learned Emacs because vi was too advanced for me. I got one page into the vi tutorial and gave up:

Q. How do I move the cursor one character forward in vi?

The correct answer is:

<ESC>la

which works in all modes. Except at the beginning of a line, where the above command will move the cursor two characters forward. If it did anything else, it would not be vi. So at the beginning of the line, this answer is the correct one:

<ESC>li

And of course neither will work at the end of the line. At the end of the line, the correct command is:

<ESC>j^i

The topic of the next two lectures will be “how to move the cursor one character backward in vI”…

And at that point, I gave up and installed Emacs.

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