Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Can you show me how fast coding is in vim?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 75 posts

Re: Ask HN: Can you show me how fast coding is in vim?

#51

Post by capote »

twunde wrote: post #49
capote wrote: post #14

You first need to learn the differences between these editors, and determine what you expect from an editor. It's pointless to compare vim, atom, and eclipse in the same thought process because they're completely different tools for different tasks. > ... as to why vim is superior Vim is not superior categorically. If you expect your editor to autocomplete Java code for you and fill in imports and look up methods for…

Fully agree. Each type of editor excels at different use-cases. vim/emacs. Once you get up to speed, you can type or move around faster than with other editors. The main reason to use these are because you're already spending most of your time in the terminal because you're a) working in an ecosystem like rails where most of the tooling is run from the terminal b) doing sysadmin tasks like editing config files, runni…

Whenever someone gets too preachy about Vim or Emacs, I always imagine them trying to work on a full .NET project with Vim. Is this even possible? I can't imagine.

Re: Ask HN: Can you show me how fast coding is in vim?

#52

Post by superskierpat »

mcbuilder wrote: post #26
nekomancer wrote: post #21

Somewhat related, I started out using Emacs and have since moved to using vim. I'm at the point where I feel semi-proficient in it, and I've started playing around with .vimrc, pathogen-based addons, as well as other stuff like ctags a bit, and based on my experience so far this extensibility and customization is what makes the text editor so powerful compared to other ones (although I can't really speak for Emacs si…

Try Spacemacs out! https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs The beauty of emacs is that it is extremely customizable. spacemacs features a full fledged vim emulation mode that does a great job of feeling like vim. As far as lisp development goes, the reason for emacs being a "better" environment is that it is implemented in a flavour of lisp, so you see a lot of great packages (paredit/smartparens, SLIME, to name a few)…

Though vim (and neovim) has the same plugins these days. I've been using paredit and it works great.

Re: Ask HN: Can you show me how fast coding is in vim?

#53

Post by facorreia »

I use vim not because I think I can type faster in it, but because I have used so many editors in so many different platforms over my career, and I realized that I could settle for just one that I can trust will be around (and be very effective, and available on any platform I choose to use) for as long as I'm alive.

Re: Ask HN: Can you show me how fast coding is in vim?

#54

Post by zzalpha »

Honestly, I switched because of RSI. Other editors require a lot of chording. Hell, just look up the term "emacs finger". Some might claim that's because of poor control key positioning, but repurposing capslock is frequently not an option and doesn't totally alleviate the problem.

Switching to Vim completely eliminated those issues for me.

As a happy bonus I gained access to a lot of Vim tricks... Normal mode is basically a weird programming language, which makes it enormously powerful, particularly for repetitive tasks. And Vim macros are magical as a consequence.

Which is why when using VS or IntelliJ I adopt Vim emulation plugin of some kind. None are perfect but most are sufficient to allow me to continue to use my Vim muscle memory in more integrated environments.

Re: Ask HN: Can you show me how fast coding is in vim?

#55

Post by meric »

soyiuz wrote: post #42

I would suggest that Vim is about more than speed, it is about flow. Think about the difference between ctrl-c and navigating to the menu to copy with your mouse. One just feels more fluid and requires less thinking. Games use extensive keybindings for the same reason. Vim in particular is a philosophy of keybindings. It has a syntax and a logic to it. For example `daw` will delete a word. To delete a sentence you wo…

`daw` will delete a word

The equivalent in any Mac OS X text editor is:

alt-left-shift-right-backspace.

Re: Ask HN: Can you show me how fast coding is in vim?

#59

Post by noobie »

pvinis wrote: post #58
bing_dai wrote: post #13

I would recommend Shortcut Foo ( https://www.shortcutfoo.com/app ) to people who want to learn vim. It offers shortcut training (pun-intended) to many other editors (Sublime, Eclipse, etc.) and languages too.

Where is the pun?

I think it's the fact that it's a training for shortcuts and the training in itself is a shortcut (i.e. short, concise etc.)

Re: Ask HN: Can you show me how fast coding is in vim?

#60

Post by pvinis »

noobie wrote: post #59
pvinis wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the pun?

I think it's the fact that it's a training for shortcuts and the training in itself is a shortcut (i.e. short, concise etc.)

Thanks for clarifying. I didn't read it in that way.
Post reply on HN