Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor

Personally I would nominate emacs using spacemacs[0], but I knew both already going in. I have a hard time understanding what people find hard about Vim, but I've used it for 7 years now (well, spacemacs now), so I probably just don't remember what was hard.

I think it wasn't so bad for me because I didn't try to learn much about it. I learned how to move, (just the hjkl part), and basic selection. Anything else was learned "just in time."

For example, even after having used vim for 7 years, I never knew about the "ib" selector. Never needed it, and doing that sort of selection has never been painful enough to me that I went searching for a "better way."

While things like vim-tutor or vim-golf or whatever they have now might work for some people, that would have killed it for me. Learning for the sake of learning will get you part of the way there, but learning out of a personal need is what leads toward "mastery." And I define mastery in a restricted sense of being able to do what you want, fluently.

[0] http://spacemacs.org/

This is so important. It's the reason I've stuck by Quicksilver all these years, and avoided Spotlight and whatever Google's search bar thingy is called.

I've never been interested in vi because the effort to reward ratio doesn't seem favourable, but I think I'll give Kakoune a try.

I think the biggest gains in using vim are the small navigation, copying, and editing keystrokes, and that there are little to no productivity gains of using other vim features like tabs and buffers, over say tabs in IntelliJ / Sublime. I am a little biased but I really think that being quick with the vim bindings really makes me a lot more productive at editing code than my non-vimming co-workers. When we're pair programming, it's usually me who does the driving because in one or two keystrokes I can do something that would take them 5+ seconds with a mouse.

So just install the vim bindings on your favourite editor and start picking it up bit by bit. You can start simple with the h,j,k,l keys for navigation, and i for insert, and use the mouse for the rest until you get up to speed.

I had been a long time vim/emacs rejector. I used ide and sublime text for most of the time.

But few weeks ago, I needed to program a server for deep learning. Because of the graphics driver on that server, there is really no option to run a gui application. So I had to learn vim.

It turned out to be not that difficult to get used to it.

The only complain I have is code navigation. The font size of the vim is fixed to the font size of the terminal. The text is relatively large, therefore the viewing window can only show few lines of code.

Sometimes, I need to reference a previously defined variable or function of the same file, It's difficult to quickly navigate to the right place.

With sublime text, it's mini map navigator is so convenient to allow me go back and forth between locations.

With vim, however, I rely more on my memory. I need to go back once and remember everything, and then go to the end of the file to edit.

I initially used Visual Studio (around 2012) and really loved the power it gave me. I never felt slow or inefficient until I saw a screencast about Apache config that used vim and I was amazed to see how the person could simply jump to places he wanted. So I set out to try vim. I switched it for all my hobby work but it didn't catch on. So I went back to Visual Studio and in 2014 I thought I should give it another go. This time I started by installing the VsVim extension for Visual Studio.

This is how I got good with Vim: - In the beginning (I think 2 weeks) I only focused on using the motions (word, next character, paragraph, blocks and regex motion), common commands like d, c and R. If it helps I saw a screencast (one of the Vim London meetup videos) which broke down Vim into a grammar to be thought of as "operator + count + motion". I also slowed the key repeat rate to make sure I don't hold arrow keys to move. DISABLE ARROW KEYS IN VSVIMRC.

- After around 2 weeks I got comfortable with that and switched to pure Vim whenever I could. You can set up an external program to call up on the current file in Visual Studio. I also learned to touch type in the next 2 weeks so that I could reap more benefits.

- After a week of moving to Vim, I started writing my vimrc with things like colorcolumn, autoindent and other simple stuff. I also installed relevant text object plugins [1]. I installed some language specific plugins and started reading the :help pages. :helpgrep is very handy. At this time I think I felt I was back to my old productivity level if not above it. It took around 3 weeks I think.

- I then proceeded to learn about jumplist, named registers, location list, differences between buffers, windows, splits and tabs and how they are INTENDED to be used. It took me around one week.

- At that point I simply started looking at some Vim screencasts [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8] and [9].

CONCLUSION:

I am more productive in Vim when writing anything other than C#, F# or Java. Visual Studio excels in that department. I debug NodeJS in VSCode. For all other things I use Vim and am noticeably faster now compared to other editors. Although yes, I really miss Visual Studio a lot when using Vim. But thankfully Visual Studio has the great VsVim plugin.

[1]: https://github.com/kana/vim-textobj-user/wiki

[2]: My .vimrc https://github.com/hashhar/dotfiles/blob/master/neovim/.conf...

[3]: https://vimeo.com/vimlondon/videos

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZTkrB_tEoY

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/user/ThoughtbotVideo/search?query=vi...

[6]: http://derekwyatt.org/vim/tutorials/index.html

[7]: http://vimcasts.org/

[8]: http://tilvim.com/

[9]: https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-anti-patterns/