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History and Effective Use of Vim

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Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#21

Post by stefco_ »

2bitencryption wrote: post #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 bi…

I've taken this approach halfway and only install plugins/config that I can easily do without. Things like git-gutter [0] and a line at the 80th column [1] are great, but I don't depend on them when I log into a remote machine. If I really want some features, I have them somewhat organized in my .vimrc [2]. It's a great compromise; I find that I haven't thought about major editor configuration in a couple of years.

[0] https://github.com/airblade/vim-gitgutter

[1] set colorcolumn=80 textwidth=79

[2] https://github.com/stefco/dotfiles/blob/master/linkfiles/.vi...

[edit] Just want to add that I 100% agree that erring towards vanilla vim is a great idea; I used to use emacs and switched to vim precisely because the starting point fit my use style far better than vanilla emacs.

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#22

Post by WorldMaker »

Diederich wrote: post #11
2bitencryption wrote: post #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 bi…

Yup. I've been using vi[m] on an almost daily basis since about 1989...wow, that's 30 years. In those decades, I have resisted putting anything in my .vi[m]rc except: set tabstop=4 set expandtab set shiftwidth=4 set shiftround That's it. And I agree with you, it's a very happy place for me.

Other than shiftround, the other three seem rather language dependent (which is why I've cluttered so many files with various vimlines/modelines over the years). Wonder if the editorconfig-vim plugin might be a better compromise "only plugin" approach? Particularly given the growing consensus towards editorconfig across editors.

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#24

Post by stirfrykitty »

Syssiphus wrote: post #19
stirfrykitty wrote: post #18

Been using vim since 1998 and rarely stray unless I'm typing notes for something unimportant and them I use Nano. Back in the day when I was a Unix admin, we often worked in full screen terminals and when editing a config file didn't like having to close the vim instance to go look at something, so learned about this little gem: :sh (go back to shell and do your thing and leave vim running) Ctrl-d to return to intact…

Or just CTRL+z and then 'fg' to go back.

Does that work in all shells?

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#25

Post by zaat »

Kaiyou wrote: post #16
topmonk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

On my keyboard I need ALT GR for [. On a side note, I'm rather disappointed that the ESC key didn't get updated with modern keyboards. The keyboard vi was designed on had ESC where Capslock now resides.

I despise and hate with passion the Capslock key. On linux I always run setxkbmpap -option caps:escape. I wish the same could be done on Windows. I got used to it so much that I find myself from time to time writing catpital letters when I'm on Windows or foreign setup.

My hate for the key came years before I thought about the possibility of remapping it. Similarly, I hate the F1, a key that when accidentally pressed on some windows machines inside programs like excel can steal the focus and leave the computer unusable until it loads the useless help sidebar (when all I wanted was hitting the F2 for editing a cell content).

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#26

Post by WorldMaker »

2bitencryption wrote: post #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 bi…

My biggest reason to not use the defaults has been keyboard layout. I've bounced back and forth between a version that deeply changed the Vim keys and one that tried to minimally change keys as best as possible. I'm back on the "minimal change" layout preference, but the problem is still "minimal change" is not "no change" and definitely not quite "nirvana".

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#27

Post by istjohn »

smitty1e wrote: post #14
newman8r wrote: post #7

To anyone who hasn't tried it - http://www.vimgolf.com/ is probably the quickest and most fun way to take your skills to the next level.

https://vimvalley.com/ isn't cheap, but you get what you pay for.

I've never come across this before. Thanks for sharing!

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#30

Post by mushufasa »

Diederich wrote: post #11
2bitencryption wrote: post #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 bi…

Yup. I've been using vi[m] on an almost daily basis since about 1989...wow, that's 30 years. In those decades, I have resisted putting anything in my .vi[m]rc except: set tabstop=4 set expandtab set shiftwidth=4 set shiftround That's it. And I agree with you, it's a very happy place for me.

I also find it important to set encoding=utf-8.

I'm not working with Latin-1 files.

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