Put your mouse away just because you're coding? This is _insane_! It's true that you hardly ever need to do things like copy&paste when programming, and that you can learn to move your cursor around really quickly and efficiently just with the keyboard, but when I want to quickly mark up a block of text, you know, "select everythign from HERE to THERE", I really can't see why it would be bad to do that with my pointing device. For example, I select a few lines of code and then say, "now put a 'try/catch' block around these lines, which catches every checked exception that could be thrown in these lines, so I only have to fill in the exception handling code." This is exactly what pointing devices are there for, they're much better at it than keyboards.

Of course, other people use vi for other tasks. If you're writing text and need to select exactly the last paragraph you just wrote, and you do exactly that _often_, it's of course beneficial to learn the appropriate keyboard shortcut, so you don't have to move your hand over to the mouse every time. However, imagine one time you have to select the last paragraph, next time you have to select the last but one paragraph, next time you have to select the next paragraph except for the first and the last line, and so on. In that case, I just can't imagine you'd benefit from 'breaking your mouse habit'. This just reminds me of guys who are proud to be be Real Programmers(tm) who use ancient, clunky systems and tell others that these are really better than modern software, mainly so they're admired for their obscure, elite hacking skills. I'd say, use the mouse, but use it wisely.

I hate syntax highlighting, and I'm sure I can come up with valid perl that will confuse any syntax highlighter yet made.

#!/usr/bin/perl
$_ = qq qjust another perl hackerq;
s s(\b[japh])suc$1seg;
print
__END__