261–265 of 265 posts
This is the wrong way to go, if the UI is so bad it requires a course, then the problem is clearly the tool.
How do you reconcile that with Vim's massive popularity? Surely, Vim users are aware that there are many "easy to learn" editors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I take it you're not a musician?
Or a pilot. Or an artist. Or a mathematician. Or basically anything difficult. This is the price we pay for having easy-to-use computers. People have developed an expectation that everything should be easy and if it's not easy for beginners then it's bad. Some things are just hard! That doesn't make them bad. Some of the best things in life actually take years of study to learn.
Artists will do what they do, just for the hell of it. given that art is expression, doing something hard like painting with your toes could be considered art.
The key is simplication, and its something I notice programmers refuse to allow in their profession.
Amazing. I came into programming from a bit of an unorthodox professional background. When I started learning web app development in a serious way, I got blindsided by some of the encounters with vim. In fact it took a long time before I even realized that it was vim I was interfacing with at first. wish I had this back then.
Mind sharing what professional background you came into programming from? I find such info always interesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I love Vim’s visual block editing and use it a lot too. Macros are more flexible but visual block works well in a lot of situations. Either way if one was really tied to multiple cursors Vim and NeoVim of course have plugins that support it. I don’t bother with them myself.
> I don't bother with them myself This makes senses, because these plugins are terrible (I've tried them), and if you had used them you wouldn't suggest them as an option. Vim macros are OK, and better than multiple cursors in the minority of situations. If you record a long macro, and you make a typo in the middle, do you know how to edit that typo in the middle of the macro? You probably don't* The answer is you pa…
That is, of course, how it comes across, although a fairly mild one. If it's not meant as a dig then I would suggest generalising the phrasing to something like "many people" so that it's not direct at me.
As it happens I do know how to copy and edit registers. It's actually something I rarely need though because I can do most multi-line edits using just Vim's visual blocks. That's out of the box with no plugins.
I only mention multi-cursor plugins because they illustrate that Vim/NeoVim can and will be taught to every new trick over time, which is one of the nice things about an actually open source editor.
I see that there's a pretty big miss in the syllabus: surround! yes, true, it's not "official" but rather a plugin, but you can't really do without it, can you?
I see, I could add a whole chapter on useful vim plugins! Thanks for the suggestion! In addition to surround, what other plugins do you think beginners should almost always use?