[ale] Broken Keyboard, help?

[Linda L. Hull.]

James P. Kinney III,

Thank you for your suggestion, I really appreciate you recommending
something you like. I'll check it out. 

My computer has one easy to reach USB plug on the front and two
on the back. Macs are cool!

In your previous message you told me:

On Sat, Jan 05, 2008 at 10:50:30PM -0500, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> Linda,
>
> Sounds like a no fun day on your end.
>
> But I have good news. vim will recover any files left open after a
> sudden crash/non-save-event.

Vim and I have a long standing love-hate relationship.
Our very handsome gray and black kitten sat on my UPS power switch
.. twice, not to mention the power failures.

The recovery from such events is not as straightforward for me
as everyone seems to feel it should be. I have .swp and .swn and 
even some .swo files.

If you only have 1 spare swp file, you can do as the error
message suggests and hit R for recover, then you will be wise
if you remember to delete the old .swp file. 
 
What do you do if the .sw? file does not have the same creation
date as the base file? It can't see it and can show a completely
blank or new file. 

One of my frustrations is that my phone-notes file was messed up.
I spent a day with diff, moving changes from the November version to
the January version, but I closed it to deal with the keyboard.

I now have:
.myphone07.swo  .myphone07.swp

E325: ATTENTION
Found a swap file by the name ".myphone07.swp"
          owned by: llhull   dated: Mon Oct  1 04:40:02 2007
         file name: ~llhull/2001-07-01/myphone07
          modified: no
         user name: llhull   host name: marcus
        process ID: 14819
While opening file "myphone07"
             dated: Sun Dec  2 00:12:04 2007
      NEWER than swap file!
 
There are changes which I don't think are reflected in either
version, but might be in the backups.

I didn't ask yet if you're a vim expert?

Linda