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Vim for Humans

vimebook.com

11–20 of 251 posts

Re: Vim for Humans

#11
post #8

2.1 For who? If the author is reading this, proper English would be "For whom?" The intro says he's not a native speaker, so it's a common mistake. Easily fixed.

In my experience, most native English speakers are easily confused about who vs whom, and avoid whom by rephrasing: Who is this book for?

Which would also be incorrect.

Re: Vim for Humans

#13

I wish I could use vim or emacs. I don't know if I'm stupid or something but all of the key bindings, everything you have to remember, it just doesn't make sense to me. I wish there was something like nano + plugins. If I had that I could implement most of what I need (other then auto-completion for a crap load of languages).

Vim takes a while to grok. You have to move away from the mindset of "memorize a lot of strange commands" to the mindset of a language for text manipulation. Then, learn the absolute minimum set of commands ([a]ppend, [i]nsert, [d]elete, [p]aste), start using, and add vocabulary gradually. Just like learning a new language.

Re: Vim for Humans

#16

I wish I could use vim or emacs. I don't know if I'm stupid or something but all of the key bindings, everything you have to remember, it just doesn't make sense to me. I wish there was something like nano + plugins. If I had that I could implement most of what I need (other then auto-completion for a crap load of languages).

Vim is very easy, I think it's just simple to get overwhelmed with it.

There are a couple of tools which gamify Vim. I personally haven't used them. But some say they're pretty good.

For me, what worked was just jumping in and going whole hog. I tried disabling the arrow keys in Normal Mode, so I would have to use hjkl for navigation. But my keyboard puts the arrow keys in easy reach (Kinesis Advantage), so it turned out not to be much of a need.

What you may like is turning on relative line numbers. That way you can visually see what line you're at, and how many lines away your target is that want to jump to. Then you can practice going 5k to go up five lines, or d2j, to from where you are to two lines down.

This article was actually eye-opening for me: https://yanpritzker.com/learn-to-speak-vim-verbs-nouns-and-m...

Maybe it'll help you too.

:wq

Re: Vim for Humans

#17

I wish I could use vim or emacs. I don't know if I'm stupid or something but all of the key bindings, everything you have to remember, it just doesn't make sense to me. I wish there was something like nano + plugins. If I had that I could implement most of what I need (other then auto-completion for a crap load of languages).

In emacs, at least, every command has a name. Anything you'd like to do can be searched using tab completion and a little guesswork, at first, by typing `alt-x` followed by the first couple letters of a plausible name for the thing you are trying to do.

It's an extremely clumsy but totally workable way to get around if you only rarely need to edit a text file on a remote server. For example, if you highlight a section of text, you can `alt-x comment-region` and emacs will automatically insert comment markers at the beginning of each line (`uncomment-region` to undo the process). Or `alt-x save-buffer` to save.

The myriad keyboard shortcuts are just aliases for the named commands, so it's a straightforward transition from the clumsy tab-complete workflow to a more efficient one once you know your way around.

Re: Vim for Humans

#19

I wish I could use vim or emacs. I don't know if I'm stupid or something but all of the key bindings, everything you have to remember, it just doesn't make sense to me. I wish there was something like nano + plugins. If I had that I could implement most of what I need (other then auto-completion for a crap load of languages).

I would suggest you try out vim with a scratch document and reference book. Focus on figuring vim out that way. It helped me.

Re: Vim for Humans

#20
post #8

2.1 For who? If the author is reading this, proper English would be "For whom?" The intro says he's not a native speaker, so it's a common mistake. Easily fixed.

In my experience, most native English speakers are easily confused about who vs whom, and avoid whom by rephrasing: Who is this book for?

Which is okay in conversation, but in writing, your pedantic editor or proofreader would probably inform you that it is considered poor style to end the sentence on a preposition. So he's basically trading one error for another.

Who/whom is indeed awkward at first to remember, but the phrase "for whom" tends to sound better on the tongue than some of the others due to its inclusion in the title "For Whom the Bell Tolls," a popular novel (or "popular Metallica song", depending on your age).

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