Aucf-cs.461
net.games
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!ucf-cs!whm
Tue Mar 9 21:16:54 1982
Vi Quiz Winner Announced
Believe it not, the Vi quiz (see ucf-cs.336) answers have been tabulated
and a winner has been found.
The envelope please...
The winner is Marty Rattner of National Semiconductor, nsc!marty. Marty
pulled out all the stops and shaved the number of keystrokes for traversal
of the gauntlet to a slim 99.
Here are Marty's answers.
Question No. Count Keystrokes
1) 2 5G
2) 2 -J
3) 1 D
4) 3 d5)
5) 1 u
6) 1 u [or .]
7) 4 c)?<ESC>
8) 5 hd%e.
9) 5 dd4<CR>p
10) 6 30|11x
11) 5 HdLGp
12) 9 <CR>i/*<ESC>A*/<ESC>
13) 1 ^G
14) 11 <CR>/the<CR>dd''.
15) 13 :se sw=12<CR>>9<CR>
16) 4 f,d;
17) 5 3A^V<BS><ESC>
18) 15 H!Ltr 0-9 1-90<CR>
19) 5 ~~~~~
20) 1 U
Total: 99
To refresh your memory, here's the test, with the answers merged.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
(1) Move to the fifth line of the file. 5G
(2) Append the current line to the end of the previous line. -J
(3) Delete all of the current line that is not to the left of
the cursor. D
(4) You are editing a document and are positioned on the first
character of a sentence. Delete the next five sentences. d5)
(5) I'm sorry, get those last five sentences back where they
were. u
(6) I just can't make my mind up, get rid of those same five
sentences. u
(7) Change the next sentence to the single character "?". c)?<ESC>
(8) You are positioned on the y in
"((x*3)-(y-(1*2*3(((())))))x*(i+(j*k))*z)", make it read:
"((x*3)-x**z)". hd%e.
(9) Move the next five lines to before the current line, retain
the order of the five lines. dd4<CR>p
(10) Delete characters 30 through 40 in the current line. Assume
that there are more than 40 characters in the current line. 30|11x
(11) Move all of the text that is visible on the screen to the
end of the file. HdLGp
(12) The next line in the file is: "<TAB><TAB><TAB>x = x + 1;<CR>",
change it to: "<TAB><TAB><TAB>/*x = x + 1;*/<CR>". <CR>i/*<ESC>A*/<ESC>
(13) Find out what line you are on. ^G
(14) Delete the next line in the file that contains the word
"the" and then delete the line that you were on before you
went looking for "the". <CR>/the<CR>dd''.
(15) Starting with the current line, move the next ten lines 12
spaces to the right. You may insert tabs if you wish. :se sw=12<CR>>9<CR>
(16) Make the sentence "The machine, described in [Smith 80], was
a complete failure." read "The machine was a complete failure."
Assume you are on the "T". f,d;
(17) Insert three backspaces after the last character of the
current line. 3A^V<BS><ESC>
(18) Change every instance of a digit, n, on the current screen,
to (n+1) mod 10, that is, 0's to 1's, 1's to 2's, ...
9's to 0's. (Hint: This might be done using something in
addition to the editor, but the editor is involved.) H!Ltr 0-9 1-90<CR>
(19) Change the string "hello" to "HELLO". Assume you are positioned
on the "h". ~~~~~
(20) You have just finished making 300 changes in the current
line in an as yet unsuccessful attempt to correct a one
word spelling error. Make the line appear as it did before
you went to work. U
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
There were 28 entries, of which 12 (gi!lou, zehntel!berry, azure!randals,
teklabs!larrym, pur-phy!rb&hal, cbosgd!mark, hoasa!rbr, uwvax!keith,
IngVax:marc, csin!rona et. al., nsc!marty, and ucbvax!earl) had correct
answers to all questions.
The top finishers were:
nsc!marty 99
azure!randals 100
pur-phy!rb&hal 102
IngVAX:marc 103
gi!lou 105
zehntel!berry 107
hoasa!rbr 109
csin!rona 109
IngVAX:arnold had 99 keystrokes but there was a slight interpretation problem
on #12 and he got the short end of the stick.
Steve Zimmerman did it using EMACS and got 91 keystrokes. (I must say
though that my main complaint with EMACS is the extensive use of the
control and escape keys, and if you count control and meta keys, and
shifts as 2 keystrokes instead of 1, EMACS uses about 215 keystrokes
while the winning Vi entry uses about 120 keystrokes. If you want
to argue about Vi and Emacs, editor-p is the place.)
As to the ideal answers, Marty seems to have the optimal answer for most
of the questions, with the exception of #14, in which the leading <CR>
could have been left out and still have passed my standards.
Several questions deserve comment.
On #8, the "e" operation is defined in some way to work consistently
on expressions and was used to good advantage. Only two people used
e "e" for their answer. Some people also used ct...$ sequences to
fix the string. The question was rather contrived and artificial, but
real points were to use the motion of the % to delete the enclosed
expression and then use the . to repeat to the last action.
Number 9 could be solved by deleting the next five lines and then putting
them back before the current line, or by moving the current line to
after the fifth line.
For number 10 several people said 30|10x, but it deletes characters
30-39, and although it's picky, the problem was to delete THROUGH 40.
Some people didn't seem to know about the HLM operators and had gruesome
answers for #11. The concept of motion is covered fairly well in
/usr/doc/ex/vi.apwh.ms.
On number 14, my intention was for 'the word "the"' to mean the word
and not the string, hence the \ operators should have been specified
in the pattern string, e.g. /\<THE\>$dd``., but only a couple of people
used the word delimiters, so I took searches for the string "the" as
being acceptable.
It was pointed out that on number 15 the :se sw=12$>>9j doesn't account
for unusual placement of blanks and tabs at the start of the line, but
since most people didn't make provisions, I accepted :se sw=12...
The real ringer was without a doubt number 18. Apparently many people
didn't know about the tr command and those that did didn't know that
arguments of the form 0-9 are as good as [0-9]. Several people pointed
out that if a shell script x was present and contained "tr 0-9 1-90",
then H!Lx would do the trick. One person used the y command of sed
to translate the string. I suppose that a better question could have
been made for 18, but in actuality, it worked out very well, most
people used tr, although many had overweight argument lists.
Although #19 involves the use of the undocumented ~ command, about half
the people knew about the ~.
Looking back
------------
I originally did an early version of this quiz at NCSU during a dull moment.
My goal in creating it was to motivate people to learn more about
Vi than just enough to get by. A number of people stated that they enjoyed
the quiz and learned something from it, so I suppose my goal has been
achieved.
The test probably seemed trivial to many people, but I wanted something
that could be done in a few minutes. Some of the things that I would
have liked to mention but didn't: The map and map! commands, reading
in a file with a ~ in the name, appending to a file. I would have also
liked to include some more ed type stuff, but most of that can be found
in the online ed quiz(6).
I've also got a Csh quiz, but its not very well defined, and sending
it out and trying to score the answers would be like grading a physics
test whose sole question was: "State the laws of thermodynamics in your
own words".
Bill Mitchell
Univ. of Central Florida
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