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History and Effective Use of Vim

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Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#2
After years of a love/hate relationship with Vim (I love what it does, but have configuring it), I had an epiphany: by sticking with the defaults, whether they are my preferred choices or not, I can instantly understand how to use Vim in any environment. Once you get used to biting the bullet and hitting escape instead of jj, or ctrl+c, it just works, everywhere.

If you abandon the urge to pimp out your Vim with a billion plugins, and just use it raw, it's a kind of editor Nirvana. Let go of your desires and live without want :)

Of course, that's just me. I understand why someone would want to turn Vim into their personalized powerhouse editor with IDE powers, with their .vimrc a 'git pull' away.

But I've learned to live with the humble defaults, and it's made life easy.

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#3

After years of a love/hate relationship with Vim (I love what it does, but have configuring it), I had an epiphany: by sticking with the defaults, whether they are my preferred choices or not, I can instantly understand how to use Vim in any environment. Once you get used to biting the bullet and hitting escape instead of jj, or ctrl+c, it just works, everywhere. If you abandon the urge to pimp out your Vim with a bi…

I am right there with you. I did the same thing, and now when I jump into Vim from anywhere, it's so much easier.

Though I really do like having the Capslock key remapped to escape.

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#4

After years of a love/hate relationship with Vim (I love what it does, but have configuring it), I had an epiphany: by sticking with the defaults, whether they are my preferred choices or not, I can instantly understand how to use Vim in any environment. Once you get used to biting the bullet and hitting escape instead of jj, or ctrl+c, it just works, everywhere. If you abandon the urge to pimp out your Vim with a bi…

Depending on your job there's no reason that you would ever need to use defaults. You should optimize your editor for your day-to-day use case

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#5

After years of a love/hate relationship with Vim (I love what it does, but have configuring it), I had an epiphany: by sticking with the defaults, whether they are my preferred choices or not, I can instantly understand how to use Vim in any environment. Once you get used to biting the bullet and hitting escape instead of jj, or ctrl+c, it just works, everywhere. If you abandon the urge to pimp out your Vim with a bi…

this +

nvi had more direct lineage to true vi, Keith Bostic was in the Bill Joy headspace, but it kind-of got stuck. Vim diverged in ways which used to annoy me but I've come to accept.

I won't mention "the other editor family" here but it is interesting to see the things in that one, which I miss in this one (for me at least) which are principally the ability to cut-paste regions, and a set of things which became screen and tmux. Now there IS screen and tmux, that matters less.

Not having 2D region cut-paste is a small price to pay for the joys of a modal editor.

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#6

After years of a love/hate relationship with Vim (I love what it does, but have configuring it), I had an epiphany: by sticking with the defaults, whether they are my preferred choices or not, I can instantly understand how to use Vim in any environment. Once you get used to biting the bullet and hitting escape instead of jj, or ctrl+c, it just works, everywhere. If you abandon the urge to pimp out your Vim with a bi…

I go for a heap of plugins but don't remap the things that start off built-in, so I get the muscle-memory for the defaults when I need a remote shell somewhere, but still the useful plugins on my own computer.

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#9

After years of a love/hate relationship with Vim (I love what it does, but have configuring it), I had an epiphany: by sticking with the defaults, whether they are my preferred choices or not, I can instantly understand how to use Vim in any environment. Once you get used to biting the bullet and hitting escape instead of jj, or ctrl+c, it just works, everywhere. If you abandon the urge to pimp out your Vim with a bi…

On a lot of machines, C-[ (control + left bracket) maps to escape. But some programs don't seem to acknowledge this? Like in firefox, doing that changes tabs, but in Emacs + evil mode it's how I "ESC."

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#10

After years of a love/hate relationship with Vim (I love what it does, but have configuring it), I had an epiphany: by sticking with the defaults, whether they are my preferred choices or not, I can instantly understand how to use Vim in any environment. Once you get used to biting the bullet and hitting escape instead of jj, or ctrl+c, it just works, everywhere. If you abandon the urge to pimp out your Vim with a bi…

Just a quick note, you can use Ctrl +[ rather than Escape. Saves your fingers from constantly having to reach for that corner.
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