Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by devbug | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

devbug

And yet it still doesn't respect the Insert key.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=adammara...

View on HN

People actually use "work deletion mode" on purpose?

I've always wished this key at least had an LED indicator along with Caps Lock.

Once upon a time, hitting insert resulted in the caret switching from line to rectangle to indicate input mode.

Now that I could dig

IntelliJ does this! Very convenient for recognizing accidentally hitting it.

It used to be that normal mode was an underline cursor and insert mode was a vertical cursor, but now that I guess vertical cursors are everywhere, Sublime switches between a vertical cursor for normal mode and an underline cursor for insert mode. A bit of a drag, but I don't use insert much at all.

One thing I'd like from the past is a blinking block cursor.

As a vim guy, and I say this because I think it makes more sense in vim, I think you mean insert mode (the “normal” mode) and replace mode (the “insert” mode). The fact that the insert is used to toggle out of the default insertion behaviour seems to add confusion.

I wasn't using the terms in the vi/m sense, but insert/replace does make more sense.

I do maybe 10% of the time as it saves a few keystrokes if you are renaming stuff. I would be annoyed if it went away. But definitely not as useful as it was 40 years ago.

But "keystroke" is a very strange metric. In terms of speed, it's often much faster to just ctrl+a and rewrite it from scratch. The mental gymnastic in trying to compute in your head the difference of characters is definitely non-trivial. It only really works if the thing you're replacing has the exact same number of characters in it.

Can you explain the exact scenario you use it in, I honestly can't think of a scenario where insert is useful.

Are you trying to tell me that the computes I do in my own head aren’t efficient? That’s pretty funny as I even have a tough time measuring that.

It’s hard to come up with exact examples because it’s actually subconscious and as automatic as touch typing for me. Thinking back, when I’m on one line with the cursor maybe halfway through, I’ll hit down arrow, alt arrow to the word I want to rename, hit insert, type over it, hit insert. I think I did it when trying to clarify some documentation. I’ll be on the lookout in the near future, but unlikely to report back here unless it happens to happen really soon.

The opposite, I'm saying that your brain might be way more efficient than mine if you can pull that off, because whenever I try to use insert mode, I have a brainfart and get way confused.

My friend's wife uses CapsLock instead of Shift for each and all capitalization needs, even the sort of capitalization done in this sentence.

See, at least that's not as bad, since you're basically going Capslock -> letter -> capslock, so it's easy to get your brain used to that. With insert mode, you need to think as fast as you type about how many letters you're overwriting.

I've been using computers for over twenty years, and I'm still yet to use the insert key on purpose. My AutoHotkey profile actually suppresses the keypress entirely, along with some media keys.

Good idea. Mine blocks F1, which gets collaterally damaged in my attempts to hit ESC. Not sure why I didn't think of this but it's going in there!

I use the Overtype extension for that: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=adammara...

It hasn't been updated in over a year, but I've yet to have any issues with it.

That's a feature, not a bug

Vim replace mode works great with VSCodeVim

Reply on news.ycombinator.com