Finally making progress with Vim

Now that the semester is over, I am finally in the mood to risk using the text editor Vim for various tasks that are important to me, and so to have a chance to learn the thing for real.

Vim enthusiasts often mention the lack of hand movement as one of the attractions of this tool. I am not attracted by that, though. I prefer a certain amount of bodily entropy when studying, and the arm movements of typing are part of that. And I value the kind of memory that comes from involving my body in thinking. That is why I use standing desks (various home-made ones — I’m unwilling to pay the exorbitant prices demanded in the marketplace). That is why I still use paper books, whose physical shape serves as a guide to my recollection of what I’ve read. The minimal hand- and arm-movements needed for Vim are helpful to touch-typing, but I don’t place great store by them in themselves.

What I am really enjoying about Vim today is the need to think, even to calculate a little before doing anything other than actually typing text. It reminds me of learning to use a scythe when I was about 14. Naturally, my inclination was just to slash at the grass. But an adult watching me, one Pierce Skinner, came over and suggested that I pause for half a second before each swing of the scythe, to consider what I was about to do. My scything improved enormously and the act of fore-thinking felt very good. I am experiencing something similar right now with Vim and enjoying it.

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I see Pierce Skinner is now a practicing clinical psychologist in New Jersey.

Perception of time and suspension of finality (studying math)

What experiences well known to me involve an altered perception of time?

One of them is improving a piece of my own prose. After laboring to bring ideas into being as words and then to cantilever those words themselves until everything balances like a Calder mobile, I may raise my head – feeling that a very long time has passed – to find that not even an hour has gone by on the clock. There follows the relief of realizing that less time has elapsed in the material world than in my experience of it — relief since so often it is the other way around, and when it is the other way around I feel a little cheated and frustrated.

Another case is the enlivening of words by music. Sometimes the result is what known as “opera time”, in which the events of a musical drama are out of step with the tempo of the same events in real life. I mentioned this effect in passing in recent posts about Donna Elvira and the cantus firmus in some of the Bach choruses. Because altered perception of narrative time is related to the visceral appreciation of music, I think of this effect as having something in common with kinesthesia, the subjective sensation of body movement and position, an idea and feeling of keen interest to me in my daily life and study habits. Of course, not all music produces this effect to the same extent and I know different listeners react differently, too.

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Since taking the first steps toward making my peace with mathematics almost two years ago, I have struggled with a third form of altered time-perception: a special feeling that comes about in trying to read and understand a mathematical idea, to fully follow or compose a proof, to formulate and solve a problem. There has been nothing in my life up to now as a humanist — linguistic fieldworker and student of the Chinese script and medieval prosody — that has prepared me for this experience. Part of the sensation is that my mind is being forced into a lower gear-ratio: suddenly, my engine has to make many more revolutions to get the wheels to turn just once.

The low-gear feeling reminds me of a half-hour spent some years ago in a tiny café in Longyan 龍巖, a small Chinese city where a market for coffee developed around 2004. In order to serve my companion and me two cups of coffee, perhaps 8 ounces in all, the café owner ground beans in a hand-operated burr mill for ten minutes, cranking rapidly the whole time. Long before he was done I felt embarrassed at the exertion he had taken on himself to make a good impression on me. He had few customers but I was the first foreigner his shop had ever had, so it was a matter of some moment for him. He had paid a lot of money to have an expert come up from Xiamen 廈門 to teach him how to make and serve coffee the “right way”, exactly the right way. His coffee was thin — but after all it was pretty good, better than you would get today in one of the big-name coffee chains here in New York.

In studying Classical Chinese, or reading collections of philological notes on an ancient dictionary manuscript, or collating piles of handwritten dialect data, you learn not to crave instantaneous satisfaction and even to distrust any result arrived at quickly. But by comparison with mathematics, all of those feel like short-term activities whose conceptual finiteness is easy to demonstrate. The reason for the difference must be that the kind of thinking we do in solving humanistic problems does not require such continual recasting of hypothesis and mindset, or for most of us (I hope I am not shocking anyone) as much rigor, either.

Unlike the other two examples I have cited — polishing my own writing, listening to thoughtfully constructed vocal music — the bending of time by mathematics is unpleasant, except in retrospect after I have succeeded in reaching a solution of some sort. I hope more practice will bring me more facility — that is a prescription that certainly works in studying Chinese, and it is what divides the good students from the mediochre ones. Sometimes mediochre students are vastly more brilliant than good ones, but Chinese requires more than brilliance for its mastery; it also requires the investment of time in what may appear to be drudgery. It requires, in short, commitment to some partial vision of the future along with a willingness to ignore the clock. As for math, impatience is certainly my chief obstacle, and impatience is one of what Epictetus calls “things that are up to us”. I have tried techniques to increase my stamina and concentration, and to recover more quickly from periodic cognitive exhaustion. And to suppress the arrogant expectation that I can cut through the difficulties quickly. Nothing I have tried helps in a way that I could call striking — I mean that nothing lives up to my arrogant expectation that I can continue to indulge in arrogant expectation — and most of it does not help at all, except to distract me and waste enough time to make me feel a little cheated and frustrated again.

In the end, I think what will really matter is my own willingness to suspend impatience and all expectation of achieving finality, to refuse to feel them. I do not find it hard to attain this suspension on some occasions — when I listen to Beethoven’s late music — but in doing math you are not listening; it is as though you are actually composing the music, yourself.

The virtue of Vim (or: why I do not remap copy and paste)

This is a meditation on making my peace with Vim, the present instantiation of vi, one of the old text editors from the days of the “editor wars” before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and their wares were fixtures in the media and our households.

In the editor wars, vi was the great rival of Emacs — this relationship has been described with precision and acerbity elsewhere, but they and their adherents were once the Punch and Judy of programmers’ intellectual world. They were seen as tokens of competing outlooks and much was made of the rivalry. When I got back into programming, I knew I would have to revive my long-deferred relationship with them. I had already found vi to suit my temperament more happily, but its learning curve is steeper so I took up Emacs first.

The two striking things about Emacs were its great power and the unfamiliar way that familiar tasks were named and conceived of. Its power is the reason to use it; the vocabulary and ideas are the price of that power. For instance, copying and pasting text are not part of Emacs — they come from the Jobs/Gates world. In Emacs there is no “clipboard” but there is a “kill-ring”, where pieces of text go when when you “kill” them with ^-k. The kill-ring is a stack structure of what we would now call clipboards, where you can find different things you have killed, if you have saved the with “kill-ring-save” (meta-key plus w). If you want to use something in the kill-ring, you “yank-pop” it back with ^-y.

I wrote this about a year ago, when I was struggling to adapt to Emacs:

Don’t think copy; think kill-ring-save;

don’t think paste; think yank.

Strange new terms are things to save;

let your mind be their bank.

I got reasonably comfortable with Emacs. It is a work of abiding quality, though as I had anticipated, not entirely perfect for me. Now I am ready to deal with Vim.

A friend recently wrote to say that he had become addicted to Vim and, despite the burden of many grave professional obligations, has found himself spending dozens of hours adjusting the settings it to suit himself. The first thing he did was remap the equivalents of copy and paste to the familiar key-commands ^-c and ^-v, and at some point after that he awoke to find himself tumbling down a steep passageway of editor configuration without end.

I told him not to feel guilty, because there are just two kinds of people: those who live on friendly terms with tools and those who don’t. We have no choice as to which kind we are. Tool-people need to spend time mastering and adjusting their tools. It is an act of self-fulfillment and neither to be rushed nor disparaged.

I did not tell him that for myself, copy/paste are among the very last things I would change.

The familiar Jobs/Gates conception of word-processing, and therefore its characteristic terminology, and therefore also its system of key commands, represents a model of thinking to which I would like to have alternatives. That was one of the big appeals about Emacs, frankly — and about Awk and TeX and Vim, all survivors from decades ago. These things, coelacanths in the ocean of modern computing, seem to me to possess a goodness of their own just because they represent a competing vision of how to work and how to use basic tools.

This, more than even Vim and Emacs in particular, is what attracts me about old utilities that have survived into the new dispensation. Using them well means training my mind to unfamiliar processes and conceptions, and that gives me a feeling of great well-being. The hunt is not about the fox.

The EMACS meta key and the standing desk

The EMACS meta key is normally mapped by default to escape. I am too stubborn to remap escape to another key, such as caps-lock, even for use within EMACS alone.

But I find myself no longer raising my left elbow and shoulder so as to hit escape with my pinky — I have begun using the middle finger of my left hand, and that seems satisfactory.

One of the advantages of the vi editor is said to be that hand movement is minimized. But I am not so sure I like that — being perfectly immobile except for my mind and my fingertips generally brings me stress, and moving around relieves it. That is also why I use a standing desk: if my whole body can fidget a little, my mind fidgets much less. And I always find that body movement aids memory and visualization.

Hard copy vs. electronic copy

Disadvantages of books:

1. Take up space.
2. Hard to search effectively and to copy selected matter from.
3. Almost always cost something to obtain, whereas electronic copy is sometimes given away or accessible at no charge through institutional databases, etc.

Advantages of books:

1. Long lasting.
2. Easier to bookmark for the very long term. (Finding an old bookmark in a book is often an unexpected gift.)
3. Three-dimensional material form aids kinesthetic memory.

Upshot: Even when I have only the PDF or HTML copy of a book, I often print a chapter or section to read from, mark up, or tote around to read outside.