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Vim for Humans

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Re: Vim for Humans

#31
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Incorrect according to whom?

If you can understand it, it's not incorrect. You might not like the style, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Re: Vim for Humans

#32
post #22

A little background. I am familiar with vi and use it only when I ssh into a server. But I never really felt it was more convenient or an improvement over a GUI based text editor or IDE on my development machine. Eg- gedit for simple text editing, Android Studio for android development, Atom for python coding. Everything works out of the box with minimal tweaking required. Genuine questions: -At what point on the lea…

Well, it depends on what you're doing. For example, if I want to duplicate a line in vi, I can type 'yyp' and _bam_: duplicate line. With a keyboard and a mouse, I have to reach over, select the whole line (being careful not to over or under select), hit Ctrl+C, move the cursor down to the beginning of the next line, and hit Ctrl+V. If I want to change the contents of a quoted string, I can type 'f"lct"' and start typing. Again, with a mouse, I have to select what I want to change: if I select too much, I can back up the mouse, but if I accidentally started the selection on the second rather than the first character, I have to abort the whole selection and start over again. If I want to change each line from the current line to the next blank line to a continuous quoted string, I can type ':.,/^$/s/\(.*\)/"\1" +/'. With a mouse, I have to click the beginning of each line and cut+paste the quotes into place, probably undoing at least a couple of times because I clicked the wrong place, etc. etc.

I know, I'm talking about milliseconds (or nanoseconds) here, but when I use vi, it's just, sort of "constant", like playing the piano. I never break my rhythm.

Re: Vim for Humans

#33

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 sectio…

After a few months using Spacemacs, I moved to neovim, but took the idea of the space leader and "meaningful" mappings with me.

I remapped the leader key to space, and created a bunch of sensible mappings: all my Markdown mappings are under m and so on.

I left most of the normal mode movements at their defaults, though.

It would be cool if someone could do a Spacevim vimrc or plugin.

Re: Vim for Humans

#34
post #22

A little background. I am familiar with vi and use it only when I ssh into a server. But I never really felt it was more convenient or an improvement over a GUI based text editor or IDE on my development machine. Eg- gedit for simple text editing, Android Studio for android development, Atom for python coding. Everything works out of the box with minimal tweaking required. Genuine questions: -At what point on the lea…

I have replied to the other commenting wondering about Vim but I will say it here as well: Learning to get fast with Vim is incredibly rewarding. It is tough to memorize everything, sure. But it's all in pursuit of speed and efficiency that become huge multipliers over your career. You use so much less hand effort, and it runs straight from the terminal which means you need fewer running applications.

Re: Vim for Humans

#35

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).

Try out Vim Adventures to get some basic commands down. Then find Vim emulation for your editor of choice. Leave it in insert mode as much as you need at first. Slowly you'll start using more Vim commands. In a while you'll wonder how you ever edited without it.

Re: Vim for Humans

#37
post #3

I've only skimmed this but there seems to be a focus on customizing and plugins from the get go. I think it's worth getting to know Vim "as is" before doing such things. Indeed there certainly some things that aren't the most useful or obvious but it's good to understand their original intent. Not to crap on the author of this but I'd recommend Drew Neil's Practical Vim over this (and pretty much every other Vim book…

I agree and then I got a little mad. My version 1 is outdated and the updated ebook is a full price cost for me. Why are some ebook companies charging full price for revisions of books purchased?

Re: Vim for Humans

#38
post #5
post #3

I've only skimmed this but there seems to be a focus on customizing and plugins from the get go. I think it's worth getting to know Vim "as is" before doing such things. Indeed there certainly some things that aren't the most useful or obvious but it's good to understand their original intent. Not to crap on the author of this but I'd recommend Drew Neil's Practical Vim over this (and pretty much every other Vim book…

I kind of agree but vim's defaults are awful. Tim Pope has put together a good set of non-opinionated defaults which don't change key bindings or customize it otherwise [0]. I have a very similar vanilla setup with no plugins apart from syntax highlighting for some languages not included by default. [0] https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible

That may be, but it's tough to use a customized vim on your local machine, and then switch to a stock install on a server somewhere, no?

Re: Vim for Humans

#39
post #22

A little background. I am familiar with vi and use it only when I ssh into a server. But I never really felt it was more convenient or an improvement over a GUI based text editor or IDE on my development machine. Eg- gedit for simple text editing, Android Studio for android development, Atom for python coding. Everything works out of the box with minimal tweaking required. Genuine questions: -At what point on the lea…

I just recently switched to vim full time, maybe 4 months ago, after my existing IDE switched to a subscription model following two updates that made the software more and more buggy. I don't have definitive answers, just experiences:

1. The first two weeks were hell. It felt like learning to use a keyboard all over again. I've tried to get started with vim multiple times, leaving because I needed something faster. This time, I just happened to catch a break in work where there was no one breathing down my neck to get stuff out the door yesterday.

After two weeks or so, you start to learn the vim mindset. It's hard to explain, but vim is both a language (via movements and interacting) and a way of thinking (via modes). I'm still adjusting to all of those, but it's gotten to the point where I think of a task, attempt it with the shortcuts I know (the "language"), and 2/3 of the time, it just works.

2. Is there speed over previous IDEs and text editors? It's about the same for me, with the added benefit that I'm no longer tied to a system I have to pay for, it's cross-platform, and pretty available in most sports.

For Mac at least, there are things like MacVIM where I believe they let you use your mouse to click around. I did all of my learning from the Laracasts vim series, and I really like his approach of doing what works for you. MacVIM adds shortcuts like command-S to save instead of :w and stuff. If it works for you, cool. I took the approach that I want to learn the base system (plus plugins) because that is a more common cross-platform interface.

From using an IDE, I don't know if I'm saving time by not using the mouse or not, but I know that I can more quickly get places within the code if I know where I'm going. I assume the benefit of not reaching over to use the mouse is helping, but I can't really tell.

For me, there were other reasons, but I don't regret the switch at all. I'm still quite the novice, but I've switched to using it nearly exclusively for projects. (If I just need to quickly open a file from the Mac Finder, I double-click and something non-vim opens. I'm OK with that, I'm no purist.)

The only place it bites you is when you use vim for a while and then go back to something like Code or SublimeText and you're typing vim commands into the screen as characters. Make sure you double-check your work so that you're not pushing ":w"'s up to production. :)

Re: Vim for Humans

#40
post #22

A little background. I am familiar with vi and use it only when I ssh into a server. But I never really felt it was more convenient or an improvement over a GUI based text editor or IDE on my development machine. Eg- gedit for simple text editing, Android Studio for android development, Atom for python coding. Everything works out of the box with minimal tweaking required. Genuine questions: -At what point on the lea…

The best comparison I have is: You know how when you are helping someone that doesn't know how to use a computer? How frustrating it is as they slowly mouse around, looking for stuff - makes you wanna just sit down and take over?

Well that's how I now feel when someone else is editing a file without Vim.

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