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…
Vim for Humans
161–170 of 251 posts
Re: Vim for Humans
#162What 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 The Blender hotkey document is 9 pages and years out of date.)
Re: Vim for Humans
#163Earlier 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.
Re: Vim for Humans
#164Earlier 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?
Re: Vim for Humans
#165Earlier 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'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
#166Earlier 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…
Re: Vim for Humans
#167Re: Vim for Humans
#168A 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…
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
#169Earlier 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…
Re: Vim for Humans
#170Earlier 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.