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by elcapitan 3720 days ago
With a ctrl-a, ctrl-c, ctrl-v loop you can "type" exponentially fast in any editor, I guess.
3 comments

It was a little more complex than that because the new stored procedure was indeed new and contained different structure, as far as I remember. ;) but yeah, copy pasting definitely takes a bit of the elegance out of it.

Most of what was demonstrated was Vim's superior capacity for jumping around to the correct place in your file precisely and quickly, which doing with a mouse is a nightmare.

Vim has a lot of key commands to quickly working with blocks of text so it is a bit more nuanced than that.

For example, to copy 3 lines from the cursor position and paste them 5 lines earlier:

3Y :-5 p

(and there are faster ways, some people are wizards)

I also do relative numbering in my vim (I have the current line labelled as 0, the line above it -1, etc) so that I can move around relative to the cursor without having to count lines. You can also do absolute numbering but I find that tedious when you have large files.

I know, I've been using vim pretty exclusively for the last 15 years or so.
Limited of course by cache reads for very large blocks of text.