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Comment by jarin | Hacker News Reader

This might sound kind of trivial, but the lack of split panes (and no hope on the horizon) is what finally pushed me over the edge to learning vim. Haven't looked back :)

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Ok, this is the wrong place to ask, but when I'm using unix text editors I'm reasonably happy EXCEPT I don't understand how anyone could use a text editor without being able to click to move the insertion point where they want it to be. Furiously leaning on the arrow keys is way too slow.

How does one solve this? is there a way to make the terminal accept mouse input? I've mostly only used pico/nano which I understand is similar to vi, et al. but maybe don't have a way to do this where other editors do?

As noted, you can run vim or emacs in a way where you can mouse where you want to go. In practice, there's usually a way to get to the place you want to be via some other command. For vi, you can usually use /search to get where you want. One of my most-used vi commands that I miss in other editors is f[char]. It moves you to the next instance of [char] on your current line. Things like f= or f( are great for bouncing through a line of source code. I wish textmate (chocolate, sublime, whatever) had a quick keyboard equivalent to that.

I use MacVim. Keyboard navigation works great for me when moving around small areas, but I use the scrollwheel and clicking all the time for moving around larger areas of a file (and for navigating NERDtree).

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