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Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

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Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#201

Post by steakknife »

pgrepds wrote: post #140
Arisaka1 wrote: post #95

I 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 tried the same a couple of month ago and I came to the conclusion that VIM will never come close to editors like VS Code.

How is it that nobody seems to know that every major editor has either vim mode or a vim plugin. I love vim, but I almost never use it directly. I usually use JetBrains IDE with vim plugin. Best of both worlds.

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#202

Post by steakknife »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #171

Nicely done. Though I have to say - I gave courses on vi in the 80's but then IDE's and GUI's came along and I moved on. I will never understand why anyone still uses vi in the 21st century, except for occasionally editing a config file on a *nix box.

How is it that nobody seems to know that every major editor has either vim mode or a vim plugin. I love vim, but I almost never use it directly. I usually use JetBrains IDE with vim plugin. Best of both worlds.

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#203

Post by cdbyr »

Silica6149 wrote: post #196
cdbyr wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed with your comments on muscle memory and very cool project overall. An issue keeping me from wanting to use this: holding down the directional keys doesn't move the cursor multiple times - it's one keypress per movement. In the desktop environment, one can hold 'j' to go down, and since there is so much vertical movement, it's important that that's replicated.

Huh, thanks for letting me know, no one else has mentioned this issue, and I haven't experienced the issue either. Can you let me know which browser and OS you're using? This seems like an important bug, thank you.

Thanks for being so responsive - I'm on Safari version 15.3 (17612.4.9.1.8), on Mac OS 12.2.1 (21D62)

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#204

Post by xavdid »

This looks very cool, kudos on the launch!

I feel like vim tutorials mostly focus on navigating and editing a single file, which is great! But I mostly struggle with how to replicate opening a whole directory in VSCode, which makes it easy to browse the directory, switch between files, open multiple panels, etc.

I'm almost certain vim does all these things out of the box, but tutorials always end at "this is how you edit some text quickly" and never cover "this is how you do software engineering".

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#205

Post by mulmen »

dash2 wrote: post #87
snet0 wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

You’re asking why this hammer can’t make ice cream. vim is a modal text editor. That’s fundamental. If you don’t like it use something else.

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#206

Post by Silica6149 »

cdbyr wrote: post #203
Silica6149 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, thanks for letting me know, no one else has mentioned this issue, and I haven't experienced the issue either. Can you let me know which browser and OS you're using? This seems like an important bug, thank you.

Thanks for being so responsive - I'm on Safari version 15.3 (17612.4.9.1.8), on Mac OS 12.2.1 (21D62)

Hey I'm on a mac too, but I can't seem to reproduce the bug. Perhaps there is a safari extension, or a native application that is interfering?

Sorry I wasn't much help, please let me know if you've found a solution, I'm curious what caused this.

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#207

Post by blt »

dash2 wrote: post #87
snet0 wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

vim is a line-oriented text editor. When using vim, my mental model of the file is an array of (mutually non-contiguous) arrays of characters, not a single array of characters. I expect the same is true for most proficient vim users.

This is clearly a great fit for programming in most languages, but it also works well for natural language. You can put one sentence per line or even split up long sentences into clauses. Then you use the line-manipulation commands to make big edits quickly. Of course, this only works for formats like LaTeX and HTML where consecutive nonempty lines are merged into one line for rendering.

Under the "array of lines" mental model, it doesn't make sense to hold down the right arrow key and traverse the entire document. You move to the desired line first, then move to the desired position in the line.

I agree the two models are basically incompatible. I don't like editing text in non-vim interfaces and will generally open vim for anything longer than this comment.

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#208

Post by artificialLimbs »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #126
mpalmer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an ordinary visual text editor Funnily enough, Vim is short for "Vi IMproved", and its predecessor vi is short for "visual"! --- Taking the time to learn Vim yields significant rewards if you're willing to meet it on its own terms. I certainly grant you that it's not for everyone. It's the agony and the ecstasy of deep tools. No pain, no gain. > The frustration is that probably there are fixes for all these things,…

These sorta combinations and things like visual block mode are why I can’t let go of vim. You can also do: set -o vi And get vim in your bash shell. Then you wonder what the default mode is, and it turns out it’s emacs and you can do wild things like ctrl-A to go to the beginning of the line. And now I cringe when ever I see someone painstakingly left-arrow for 30 seconds to edit something at the beginning of their b…

>> set -o vi

A million thanks!

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#209

Post by artificialLimbs »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #171

Nicely done. Though I have to say - I gave courses on vi in the 80's but then IDE's and GUI's came along and I moved on. I will never understand why anyone still uses vi in the 21st century, except for occasionally editing a config file on a *nix box.

Normal mode navigation, macros, (mostly because I end up editing a lot of repetitive old code), and marks so far. Using vim for vscode enables me to much more quickly bang out code.

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#210

Post by vidyesh »

xavdid wrote: post #204

This looks very cool, kudos on the launch! I feel like vim tutorials mostly focus on navigating and editing a single file, which is great! But I mostly struggle with how to replicate opening a whole directory in VSCode, which makes it easy to browse the directory, switch between files, open multiple panels, etc. I'm almost certain vim does all these things out of the box, but tutorials always end at "this is how you…

I am new to using vim too so NerdTree is a little hard for me to use and navigate and the split windows too are difficult to understand in vim. Not many tutorials or guides or courses cover that well.

So I have the same issue as you, I really like using neovim for smaller projects as its easy to work on them through the shell. But when it comes to big projects I go back to VSCode with the Vim emulator extension as it just makes using the tree much easier for me in VSCode. I have setup custom keybindings and settings to launch the directory when needed or the command palette works great to launch other files. I wish there was a resource to help switch VSCode to neovim while retaining some of the "most" used VSCode features.

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