Linux Journal: Vi IMproved–Vim and Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2

“When you type vi on most Linux boxes, you’re likely to
get Vim. This is a good thing, but until now nobody has written a
book that covers the features Vim has over vi.

Steve Oualline to the rescue. Some readers wrote in to say that
Steve changed their lives with his article ‘That’s Vimprovement! A
Better vi’ in our February issue. It’s wonderful to be a part of
bringing such a wonderful transformation to you people, and Steve’s
new book brings even more Vim knowledge to the masses.

Thank the book gods that it didn’t come bundled with a CD-ROM. I
hope this is a trend–book publishers should stop including
software that will probably be obsolete for most of the book’s
shelf life. If this book should be bundled with anything, it’s the
new Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2 from PFU America. We used the
QWERTY version, but there are also Dvorak and Japanese
versions.

Vim enhances the original vi so you can edit faster, but the
Happy Hacking series of keyboards removes features to achieve the
same goal. There’s no top row of function keys or anything right of
Enter. Escape moves down to just left of the number one, which is
why we’re mentioning this keyboard in an review of a book about
Vim–there’ll be no more ‘Mom, can you make me some sandwiches? I’m
going to go hit Escape today, be back for dinner.’ The missing keys
are available with Fn, so you can still do a SysRq if you need
to.”

Complete
Story