Vim 8.1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Vim 8.1

#91

Post by aranelsurion » Sat, May 19, 2018, 11:53 AM UTC

ssijak wrote: post #2

I want to learn Vim and tried several times (with vim modes form Intellij mainly) but failed under pressure to get actual things done. I see great potential and I know I have to sacrifice 1-2 month of productivity to get up to speed but I fail every time.

I don't think you have to sacrifice any meaningful amount of productivity to learn Vim. Contrary to popular opinion, I think vim has a pretty smooth learning curve to begin editing with it.

It might take a bit more effort to learn than, say, Sublime Text or Atom, yet after playing with "vimtutor" and reading a blog-post or two, you can learn how to open a couple of files and display them in splits, how to do modal editing, search, replace, copy/paste[1], undo/redo, save and close in a vim buffer. It's basically everything you will need to start using vim as your primary editor and it can be learned in a couple of hours.

After that, you can always learn deeper aspects of vim later and customize it in a leisurely pace in weeks to come.

Re: Vim 8.1

#92

Post by Veedrac » Sun, May 20, 2018, 3:00 AM UTC

ssijak wrote: post #2

I want to learn Vim and tried several times (with vim modes form Intellij mainly) but failed under pressure to get actual things done. I see great potential and I know I have to sacrifice 1-2 month of productivity to get up to speed but I fail every time.

If you just want to learn Vim because you think it's some magically fast editor, don't. It's not particularly fast at expressing actions, and modal editing is mostly useful if you have a particular dislike of chording.

I suspect most Vim users feel comparatively fast because of all the time they spent learning keybindings, not because of the editor. So just do that: figure out how to do editing actions faster in your current editor. I can beat a significant fraction of VimGolf scores with Sublime Text.

Re: Vim 8.1

#93

Post by notheguyouthink » Mon, May 21, 2018, 5:10 PM UTC

dozzie wrote: post #86

notheguyouthink wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think visual selections in vim work the same as in kakoune though, do they? It's a powerful primitive in Kakoune, from regex to multiple cursors. My vim knowledge on selection mode is quite limited however, so I can't directly compare them. Can you just turn on selection mode and use that all the time? I may have to try that, as it sounds like you're suggesting it's a first class feature in Vim. Something I n…

> I don't think visual selections in vim work the same as in kakoune though, do they? I have no idea. I've never used Kakoune. > Can you just turn on selection mode and use that all the time? How would you use that ? Have a text selected all the time or what?

Not sure, I've not used selection mode all the time lol. You're the one who (due to my interpretation) implied Kakoune and Vim were similar on the text selection mode.

Ie, even ignore advanced features, Kakoune fundamentally is permanently in a select->action mode, rather than vim's action->motion mode.

You replied to my comment of the reversed select->action mode that Kakoune uses saying that Vim can do the same thing with Visual Selection mode. So that's why I asked, is that something I can just work in all the time? Because with Kakoune, I am working in that all the time.

That's why I asked, because you countered saying Vim can do that, but I don't want to constantly go into visual mode. I work in Kakoune none stop like that, it's core to the editor. Can visual mode do that?