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Vim for Humans

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161–170 of 251 posts

Re: Vim for Humans

#161
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. T…

SublimeText allows you to edit text using vim modes as well.

Re: Vim for Humans

#162

What Vim, and a lot of other programs, really need is a single plastic-covered card which tells you how to use the program. You can squeeze a summary of calculus on one such card. Is it too much to ask for software? (I really, really want that for Blender. The Blender hotkey document is 9 pages and years out of date.)

There are many:

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=vim+cheatsheet&safe=activ...

Re: Vim for Humans

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Vim because I have to due to limitations, I use it because it's a joy to use. What would you suggest people use instead?

I've been very happy with the IntelliJ, RubyMine, WebStorm family of IDEs. They have similar UIs to all the other modern software I use, doesn't require a learning curve to start typing, and have tons of features the vi/emacs people don't miss because they don't know they exist. I understand that it's hard for old timer to learn a new tool. I do not understand why they're still taught to beginner programmers.

Can any of those modern UI's do windowing as good as vim or emacs?

Re: Vim for Humans

#164
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Developers spend 99.9% of their time working in their local environment, so this isn't very important for them. If you're a sysadmin, then it makes sense, but then you're probably already proficient enough with vim or some other editor that works on your server.

Re: Vim for Humans

#165
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who only uses Vim casually, what's an example of a bad default? By default, vim doesn't enable filetype detection or syntax highlighting, so even though it can easily recognize a source file's language, it doesn't.

Anecdotally, this is exactly the sort of thing I have never needed while using vim on a server. Just let me modify content in the word hole...

I must be weird or something but I've gone back and forth between vim and emacs for years before finally settling on just vi (Keith Bostic's nvi, to be exact).

I've spent countless hours reading about and installing plugins on both of those big editors instead of just getting work done. Now that I just use vi, I realize how little of that stuff I need and how much I can get done with just macros and ! (the shell out command).

Re: Vim for Humans

#166
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will add some of my own opinions: My feeling is that real value of Vim is its novel approach to modal text manipulation, and you shouldn't let the fact that it has a standalone lightweight reference implementation usefully installed on almost every machine that you use confuse you. Vim script is not a great plugin language, and the vim runtime itself is not fantastic at doing things beyond the text editing. I think…

> NeoVim seems like a bit of a waste to me, because I think it misses the point. Vim is not a platform. Neovim is designed to be hosted (embedded). Embedding Neovim in a IDE (platform) allows Neovim to be the editor while exposing the IDE as "the platform". It's also a guiding principle of Neovim to not dictate what applications are built with it, so yes, you can leverage its API as a platform. But that's not the sin…

What's the process of embedding neovim into something like xcode? the thing that always got me confused is how the IDE would handle the text changing on an open file like that. What's the flow expected to be?

Re: Vim for Humans

#168
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 ty…

```f"lct"``` can just be changed to ```ci"``` and it will do exactly that with fewer strokes and is easier to remember and more resistant to where you are wrt the first double quote. (can be remember by change inside ") if you are inside a double quoted string already it will still work correctly and if you are before it on the line it will search forward for it and change the same string.

works with ( and { and ' as well. also, ```ca"``` will do the same but include the " in the change. (change around the ")

not sure if it's built into the stock vim but ```cit``` will do a change inner tag for html and xml tags too.

Re: Vim for Humans

#169
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, this is exactly the sort of thing I have never needed while using vim on a server. Just let me modify content in the word hole...

I must be weird or something but I've gone back and forth between vim and emacs for years before finally settling on just vi (Keith Bostic's nvi, to be exact). I've spent countless hours reading about and installing plugins on both of those big editors instead of just getting work done. Now that I just use vi, I realize how little of that stuff I need and how much I can get done with just macros and ! (the shell out…

I've encountered several quite painful behaviors of traditional vi that vim fixes. For instance, with traditional vi, if you start out changing a region, you can't move or change text outside that region without exiting insert mode.

Re: Vim for Humans

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given the rephrasing was done to avoid the question of "should we use 'who' or 'whom' here?", I think it's fair to point out that the new phrasing suffers from the same problem.
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