Re: Fixing rectangle operations

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2005-12-15 16:21, Miles Bader <address@hidden> wrote:
> "Herbert Euler" <address@hidden> writes:
> > The point is before 'long' in the first line. Vim documents
> > that if one want to insert 'very ' before these two 'long's,
> > it will ignore the short line. Hence the result is:
> >
> >     This is a very long line
> >     short
> >     Any other very long line
>
> I dunno, vim's behavior seems kind of bizarre to me.
>
> Treating all lines as implicitly "blank extended" in rectangle
> operations seems much more natural (and _not_ doing so likely
> to cause a lot of user confusion).

Agreed,

I regularly use rectangle-mode to 'draw' boxes like:

    +--------+
    |        |
    |        |
    +--------+

With the current behavior of Emacs, I can start with:

    +


    +

and fill 'empty' areas with C-u ARG '-' and C-x r t.

Vim's behavior, on the other hand, is extremely annoying for this
sort of work, because I have to manually 'prefill' empty areas
with whitespace and then hit ^V to operate on the current rectangle.

FWIW, if there is a possibility of keeping the current Emacs
behavior and using C-u to switch to Vim's default, then I'd
really prefer that very much.

- Giorgos