Humor: Cargo Cult Programming

[Bob Bell]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 04:57:44PM -0500, Steven Knight <steven.knight at unh.edu> wrote:
> > Emacs has a general scheme for auto-completing keywords.  Let's say
> > that I have three files loaded into Emacs, two locally and one
> > remotely (via a ssh connection, for example).  Let's say that the file
> > on the remote machine happens to contain the word
> > "supercalifragilisticexpeialidocious".  Let's say that I am currently
> > editing one of the local files.  By pressing a tiny few keys, I've got
> > my emacs setup so I can just type "sup M-/" and
> > "supercalifragilisticexpeialidocious" will magically appear (because
> > it is a potential completion).
> > 
> > Out of curiosity, does VIM do anything like this?
> 
> Yeah, if I do:
> 
> :e mai<tab> will do the completion.

    Actually, I think he means editing the buffer text.  This can be
done with ^N ("next", starts looking below) and ^P ("previous", start
looking above).  Both can be repeated until the desired match is found.
When editing a C file, this will also search the #include-d headers.

> > Suppose I decide that this looks horrible, and I want to clean this
> > up.  In Emacs I can type a few keys and transmorgify things thusly:
<snip>
> > Out of curiosity, does VIM do anything like this?

    I'm not sure I even understand what is being asked (I missed the
original email).

> > Suppose I have cut and pasted 5 paragraphs from somewhere else, and
> > all of the lines are >80 characters in length.  I can easily instruct
> > Emacs to just "fill" these paragraphs and wrap all of the lines
> > properly.
> > 
> > Out of curiosity, does VIM do anything like this?
> 
> I'm not sure how to do these two things.

    I don't what "fill" means, but yes, you can re-wrap lines in vim.
'gq' reformats the selected text.

-- 
Bob Bell <bobbell at zk3.dec.com>
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