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Comment by skolor | Hacker News Reader

Is there a significant advantage to using this over regular vim? This looks like just a gui on top of it, which defeats a lot of the "Don't use the mouse" functionality of vim. It seems to be shooting itself in the foot, why would you give the ability to click to options rather than making it easier to get help via keyboard?

(This is as a new person to vim, who still has to look at a cheat sheet regularly to do basic things)

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Maybe the idea is to get users hooked on the powerful features first, so they will then decide to tackle the command interface to increase speed.

Its exactly my way.

I felt that way, too. One could argue that many modern GUI features are more of an excuse to use the mouse, as opposed to actually taking advantage of anything that a mouse is good at.

Even text selection, which ought to be fast with a mouse, is slow; it's hard to precisely click the end points, and the target may require scrolling in order to make it clickable. When you can do something like "3dw<return>P" (move 3 words to beginning of next line) instantly, the mouse is almost never more efficient.

For me the main point is to make the learning curve less steep. One can use The Editor without cheat sheet or studying manual.

Selecting text using keyboard: while moving cursor use the Shift key Luke. And maybe a little Control key.

Using mouse? You can, but don't have to.

Yeah, but I can almost guarantee that anyone using Cream will think "How is this any better than <GUI editor of choice>?"

In my opinion, the only way anyone new to vi is gonna be sold is by struggling through the learning curve. They'll have an "ah-ha" moment soon enough.

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