When I was learning vim, I decided to extend the existing vimtutor with some more programming specific tasks. You can find it at https://github.com/drodil/codetutor.vim if you are interested :)
Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
111–120 of 265 posts
Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why can't I hit right at the end of a line, and move to the next line? I know this is probably something that sounds like someone too far down the rabbit-hole to see where they came from, but I'm not sure why you'd want to do that. The horizontal movement is probably adjacent to the vertical movement on your keyboard. Just use the appropriate movement to get where you want to go? > Also, why do I have to have a spe…
My answer to all these things is that 90% of the time, I am not using a text editor. I will be writing in Word, or in LyX, or in RStudio, or in a text box. My muscle memory is used to that. You're absolutely right. You do sound far down the rabbit hole! I am used to being able to hold down the right key and traverse my entire document, as far as I like. Why would I want to stop at the end of a line? Any time I'm edit…
> I will be writing in Word, or in LyX, or in RStudio, or in a text box.
You might still spend more time editing than writing, and Vim's modal approach makes editing more comfortable to me.
> Why is that worse than having a special key that goes into control mode? This is analogous to having caps lock, but no shift key.
The assumption is that modal editing is more comfortable and powerful. I can traverse the text and make modifications and replacements without holding chords between Ctrl, Alt and letter or arrow keys for long periods of time. Vim's model with text objects also makes some things easier to do than what you can accomplish with chords on editors liks VS Code.
If you spend a significant amount of time writing in all caps, you might benefit from having a Caps Lock key instead of shift.
> I don't want to do anything new. Why would I? I want to get on with my job.
Vim is something that's radically different from other text editors. If you think the learning curve is not worth it, it's up to you. It might not be; it's not like it will turn you into a better writer or programmer. But its uniqueness was enticing enough for me to give it a go, and I realised I enjoyed working with it.
> "if you try it, one day you will understand"
I don't think you should try Vim because it will magically make you a better professional. That's a fantasy some people use to justify the time investment they made to adapt to Vim. I think you should learn it if you're curious, and it's fine if you start learning and decide it's not worth your time. Have you never learnt something just for the fun of it?
PS: If you use VS Code or a JetBrains IDE, I don't recommend switching to Vim. Just do Vimtutor and go back to your regular IDE with a Vim plug-in. VS Code's is pretty good. This is the best of both worlds: you get all the powerful extensions and general IDE goodness while having Vim's Normal and Visual modes. As a bonus, you can still use the regular navigation and editing shortcuts while in Insert mode in VS Code. E.g. navigiating and selecting with Shift, Alt and Command plus arrow keys works like normal, so you don't need to switch modes for small things.
Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#113I often use vim for editing files but not code. The need to adhere to corporate style pretty much kills it for that.
Is editorconfig any use there? It definitely makes life easier on projects where the contributors have a mix of tools.
Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vim has visual block mode for multi cursor which you can enter with ctrl-v
Yeah that works for selecting contiguous blocks of text. Multi-cursor editing allows for selecting rows that are further apart.
vim-visual-multi works well.
https://github.com/mg979/vim-visual-multi
I do wish it was built in (like in vis) though
Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#115I once tried to migrate from VS Code to Neovim. I use TypeScript at work, and use many languages for my side projects. But the worst part was making Vim provide with things that you'd expect programming editors to have. So many options, what's best is up to opinion, integrating language servers, getting intellisense to work as you would expect, searching the project folder for file names. Then I realized that all I'm…
Okay, but you spend 2000 hours per year at work.
So 10 hours on a config is only .5%, which is the productivity gain you need to realise to get that time back in one year (assuming you also spend 0 hours on fighting vscode).
Unless you're retiring within the year, that calculus doesn't make sense.
The productivity boost you get with from Emacs/vim is huge once you learn it well.
I strongly believe that learning one of these two editors is probably the easiest and biggest skills leap you can take as an intermediate or senior developer.
No other skill you can learn will have as big of a payoff to your productivity given the relatively small effort to get proficient.
Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#116I once tried to migrate from VS Code to Neovim. I use TypeScript at work, and use many languages for my side projects. But the worst part was making Vim provide with things that you'd expect programming editors to have. So many options, what's best is up to opinion, integrating language servers, getting intellisense to work as you would expect, searching the project folder for file names. Then I realized that all I'm…
I use VSCode with NeoVim as a backend.
https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim
I highly recommend this if you know vim keybindings and want an IDE experience.
Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#117My pet peeve is Vim tutorials that start with "use hjkl to move around" instead of "use `set mouse=a` to turn on the mouse." In my opinion you need to make sure that you are very clearly disclaiming that you are teaching a harder way of doing things in exchange for incredibly small productivity gains that will be realized years in the future, if ever. (This is basically a copy-paste of previous comments I’ve made, I…
a harder way of doing things initially in exchange for incredibly small productivity gains that when applied millions of times over the course of a programming career, make a monumental difference
A key ethos of Vim is that once you climb the initial learning curve, you're on a path of increased efficiency for the long haul. Moving the hand to the mouse, dragging the cursor to the spot you want, then moving the hand back to the keyboard, is objectively slower than key-based movement commands for someone who has climbed the learning curve and I'm confident that could be proven empirically though I'm not aware of any such proof. There may be certain exceptional cases where the mouse is faster, but for most editor usage it would not be. I'm not sure if you agree w/ that and are just criticizing how tutorials introduce people to Vim, that they should start w/ the mouse to lower the learning curve, which might be an okay argument.
Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can also be a boon. One of the things some vim users like is always being able to discover something new, after using it for years. I'm not really in this camp though, I would prefer vim commands to somehow be more "discoverable". Much easier said than done, though.
What were the last three things that you discovered in your editor?
In Helix:
- space, k for documentation on the thing under the cursor
- space, [yp] for copying/pasting to the system clipboard
- m, [ai], [acfo] for selecting around/in language structures
This is easy because Helix has a very fast command palette thing, and a lot of its commands are behind consistent prefixes, so if you know `mi(` for selecting within parentheses, you can do `mi` to ask "what other things can I select within?"
Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#119Please just read Practical Vim if you’re going to double down on using Vim. All of these tutorials are the minimal basics. Vim forces you to glue together lots of inefficient commands to manipulate text. I feel frustrated seeing Vim users tout how efficient their editor is when they haven’t learned all of Vim’s nasty bells and whistles you need to actually be efficient at manipulating text. (When you press colon, do…
I can't really understand whether you recommend Vim itself or not, because of these sentences: > Vim forces you to glue together lots of inefficient commands to manipulate text > Vim’s nasty bells and whistles you need to actually be efficient at manipulating text
I’m a power Vim user. I do not recommend it for code editing. Learn it as a curiosity if you want. It’s also handy for quickly editing over SSH. IDEs with multiple cursors are so much nicer than Vim.
Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#120I tried out vim for a month or so. I did enjoy using it, although I'm not sure if using vim just feels more productive because you press more keys to do the same thing. However multi-cursor editing and cutting whole lines in modern editors is way more conducive to my workflow and eventually stopped using vim. Do vim users know if there was anything like Select next occurrence in vim? Feature discovery is not one of v…
You can search & replace all occurences of a word with the substitute command. Type : and write `%s/user/account/g`. Although you won't get a real-time preview and will only see the changes after they've happened, unless you use a bunch of extensions(I use nvim).
> Although you won't get a real-time preview and will only see the changes after they've happened, unless you use a bunch of extensions(I use nvim).
In Neovim, you can just :set inccommand=nosplit (actually, it's the default now).