291–300 of 420 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I apologise in advance if this sounds dismissive, but: I've tried to use both Vim and Emacs and Neovim and Spacemacs, and every time my pain point is that they're designed for use on the command line rather than as an environment I can switch in and out of. I know this isn't strictly true as both editors can be run as separate applications that you don't quit for weeks, but their roots have persisted into how they're…
It seems like your major objection is persistence of your session (which is more than just editor instances) but it includes your shells, their position on filesystem, your terminal splits, their position and color etc. There is a tool that handles exactly that and its called tmux. It allows you to create a session (or multiple sessions), create windows, position them exactly the way you like, open your editor of cho…
But yeah, that's pretty much my objection -- it's not a big one, and there's room in the world for more than one type of software. I'm aware of tmux, but it just shifts the problem from vim to tmux: once you need to upgrade tmux, or your OS, or your computer, everything you've set up gets lost, and I really don't want that to happen.
I'm also aware of things like teamocil, and I even used itermocil for a while. But it turns out that the kind of environment edits I like to make are ones that I just do, rather than ones I can specify in a config file then restart to set everything up again. For example, when you say:
> If you are just exploring the code base or making small edits here and there you don't really need persistent tmux session for that.
Coincidentally I do have a relevant example for that. Last week, when I was exploring the files that make up the zoneinfo database, I put the files that I needed to keep referring to (of which there were like 5) to the side, knowing full well that they wouldn't go away. Then they just stayed there for a while as I got distracted with other stuff. This week, when I had to return to it, they're still there; and all the files from the other projects I'm working on are all in their positions, too, ready for when I switch back next week, surviving through a system restart and an editor upgrade.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since I happen to have the answer to both of those: `daw` and `diw` deletes a whole word (unlike `dw` which only deletes forward). They differ in what they do with whitespace; `aw` also trims trailing whitespace (or leading whitespace if there's no trailing) while `iw` leaves the whitespace alone. These two are text objects that can be combined with other commands and quantifiers, so that `yaw` copies a word without…
What's the difference between bdw and daw? I already use "b", "e", and "w" quite a lot, so the "a" and "i" infixes seem a little redundant. Is there an advantage to the infixes that I'm not seeing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Visual Studio, creating a custom keybinding appears to involve three dropdown menus, a dialog box, and at least two UI controls. In Emacs or Vim, it's a single line of code you add to your initialization file. I think there may be different definitions of "easy" in play here. I'll concede that Visual Studio makes custom keybindings possible , but so does any text editor worthy of even momentary consideration as a…
And you're hardly alone in doing Magic Things in org-mode. Org-mode is like the storied elephant being groped by blind men, all finding a different piece of anatomy, and each concluding that the elephant is something different. Org-mode is a best-of-breed outlining application. It's a dead-simple workflow management and time tracking application. Org-mode is a better Markdown than Markdown integrated with a multi-for…
It can even export to Markdown! (And I'll only author in Markdown under duress anymore.)
It's funny that you chose the phrase "Magic Things". Before I settled on the "superpower" metaphor, I was going to talk about the times when I've done things with Emacs, in and out of Org-mode, that have made my colleagues say things like "wow, that's really cool" or "holy shit how did you even just do that". I opted not to because I figured it would sound like bragging, on the one hand, and on the other because you can do things in Emacs that really do have to be seen to be believed. But "magic" is the word I was going to use.
(It's not always an advantage, either. I've had people show contempt for things like Org-mode tables, on the assumption that because they're rendered in text, they can't possibly be anything other than text, and I must be wasting insane amounts of time making columns line up and the like. I used to work for one of those people. I'm really glad I don't work for him any more.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People usually claim that one thing is more productive than the other without any real evidence. I think it's mostly just so we can stick with something out of familiarity. Or sometimes it's so we can switch to something else because we're bored. The "it feels right to me" argument just seems unbeatable (you can't argue with it without seeming like a jerk). For example, I might say that I'm super productive in IDE X,…
But that's an unknown right? You may or may not be more productive in IDE Y, but making the effort to find that out takes more time, your most precious resource, for something that may not even turn out to be true, and then your investment is wasted. I think this is why people tend to make the broad statements about "X is better than Y" since they only have their own experience to go on, but without full knowledge of…
This is always true, in every domain. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. I think it's worth some amount of effort to find out, but at some point, you have to settle on something and move on.
Personally, I used to be an emacs user, then switched to Eclipse with some emacs keybindings, then learned vim after many years of being frustrated by it, and now use an IDE with a vim plugin (and occasionally straight vim). I feel like I've settled on the best of all worlds... for _me_ at least.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I apologise in advance if this sounds dismissive, but: I've tried to use both Vim and Emacs and Neovim and Spacemacs, and every time my pain point is that they're designed for use on the command line rather than as an environment I can switch in and out of. I know this isn't strictly true as both editors can be run as separate applications that you don't quit for weeks, but their roots have persisted into how they're…
This is strange to me, coming from the Unix philosophy of ‘do one thing well’. I don't expect a text editor to manage windows; I use a window manager for that. Then my (highly personalized) window management works the same for everything, not just text editing.
I have a mixed feeling as a NeoVim user and long-time Vim user. On the one hand, great to see such a huge release for Vim that brings so many features people have been begging for. Especially Async IO and JSON. On the other hand, I hope Vim just become more stable and performant while not introducing new features. At the same time, I hope more development could go into NeoVim, and more people could start using it and…
I'm not a NeoVim user, but I've been on the edge of becoming one for a while. What I'm still holding out for is an _embeddable_ NeoVim. The thing I really don't like about IDEs is that I love my Vim configuration but I never get to actually use the damn thing since I do most of my work in an IDE. Now imagine if the IDE could actually just embed NeoVim, and I could use my Vimrc as-is with all the plugins (now managed…
I'm pretty sure SolidOak just embeds neovim: https://github.com/oakes/SolidOak
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "I want to extend my tools with code, not configuration." You can do that with Visual Studio too with Visual Studio Extensions. You can also manage extensions (including those from other users) with a built-in package manager, just like in Emacs. Here's a Visual Studio Extensions tutorial if you're interested: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Buildi...
Yes, but writing a Visual Studio extension (or Eclipse, etc.) is much higher friction than Emacs. In emacs, I can just open a buffer in emacs-lisp-mode, write a quick function, immediately eval it and start using it. The instant feedback means that quick, small customizations are very low cost. It's like the difference between writing a code generator for Java vs using macros in Lisp.
I switched to AutoHotKey and now I have a macro system that works everywhere.
Does anybody know what native feature is missing in Vim that makes Ctrl-P (with all optimizations) slower than Emacs ido-mode?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not like you can't use keyboard shortcuts in a modern IDE. And for some tasks using the mouse actually is faster. I think there's some research by Apple (?) that shows this.
> I think there's some research by Apple (?) that shows this. There was, but it was bogus. The subjects were given a paragraph in which every ‘e’ had been replaced by a bar ‘|’ and they had to change them back. But they were only allowed to use the basic Macintosh text box, so they had to use the cursor keys to move to each ‘|’, delete it, and type an ‘e’. Obviously (obvious to vi users, anyway) this is not an effici…