History and Effective Use of Vim • Hacker News Board

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#111

Post by bin0 » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 11:54 PM UTC

cgag wrote: post #66

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 use a bunch of plugins and I've never had trouble remembering the defaults in the odd case I'm unable to use my own config. I don't get why the top comment on all vim threads is always recommending using poor defaults your whole life so you can avoid learning to configure it or avoid a second of confusion when you're ssh'd somewhere. Maybe everyone else besides me spends all their time ssh'd into random servers.

It's not a serious issue for me. I can't download my configs to random devices either. Working on embedded stuff I've usually only got vi, and honestly, the most annoying thing is no `F` binding (which is a default in vim).

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#112

Post by _hardwaregeek » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 11:57 PM UTC

nightkoder wrote: post #70

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #35

I realized why Vim has always felt a little off to me. The primary navigational commands are mostly on the right hand, which as a left handed person feels very weird to me. While Emacs commands favor neither hand (if anything they favor the left with C-f, C-b, C-a, C-e, C-x C-s, M-x, etc). Just a small observation.

You may enjoy a dvorak keyboard. Up and down (j and k) are the c and v keys. Left and right (h and l) are j and p.

Yeah...but I like other people being able to use my keyboard. Besides I already get confused between Windows shortcuts and Mac ones. Can't imagine QWERTY vs DVORAK

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#113

Post by coldtea » Sat, Jul 20, 2019, 12:03 AM UTC

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…

>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.

Which I've never found much important.

If you know Vim basics (modes, basic commands, movements, etc), then you can use vim in any environment that you SSH to or happen to have to work temporarily on.

But why wouldn't you want the Vim on your main driver laptop, which you use every day to not have a nice custom setup, and some good third party plugins (e.g. file search, linting, etc)?

It's not like using them will make you forgot the basic commands, movements, etc, to use vim in some unknown remote machine.

And it's also not like you should optimize for the random remote machine you'll get in, and not where you spend hours programming every day.

So unless one is a sysadmin and has no real "main" machine he uses vim in, this makes no sense to me...

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#114

Post by miguelmota » Sat, Jul 20, 2019, 12:06 AM UTC

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…

Been using vim for almost a decade and embarrassed to not have known about how to go back to vim after doing `:sh` , so thanks for sharing that. I use tmux all the time so I tend to switch to a pane running bash and `ctrl-b z` to toggle the pane fullscreen

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#115

Post by Anthony-G » Sat, Jul 20, 2019, 12:07 AM UTC

MoratoriumBone wrote: post #20

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.

I bind my CAPSLOCK to ECAPE that way instead of the escape key killing my hand my left pinky finger can just naturally get me out of insert mode by hitting CAPSLOCK.

I used to do this and really enjoyed the convenience.

Whenever I resume a Vim session (from another window/terminal), I have a habit of automatically pressing the (Escape) key to ensure I'm in Normal mode. However, every now and again, I have to use Vim on someone else's computer and muscle memory would cause me to press CapsLock instead of Escape. Then pressing 'h' moves the cursor all the way to the top of the screen instead of one space to the left, pressing 'j' joins the current line to the following one instead of moving the cursor, etc. Because I'm used to typing normal mode keys in quick succession, I've already entered 4 or 5 normal commands before I realise it's all going horribly wrong. I press 'u' a few times to undo the craziness but successive presses of 'U' only undoes the previous Undo action!

In the end, I retrained myself to use Ctrl-[ which isn't quite as convenient but does work on all platforms I've had to use.

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#116

Post by TheGrassyKnoll » Sat, Jul 20, 2019, 12:19 AM UTC

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.

That's what I do in Emacs. I always run it from a terminal (currently using Terminator).

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#117

Post by sevensor » Sat, Jul 20, 2019, 12:29 AM UTC

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.

The nice thing about these settings (I use the same ones) is that if you're on a machine that's not configured to use them, they take only moments to type.

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#118

Post by Diederich » Sat, Jul 20, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

begriffs wrote: post #100

mushufasa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also find it important to set encoding=utf-8. I'm not working with Latin-1 files.

Yes, this is a good idea, although I'd like to note there is more nuance. * `encoding` is what vim uses internally -- the way buffers and registers are stored in memory. Default value is latin1 as you mention, but it will also pick up on the $LANG environment variable. It's more effective in general to set that variable than directly tweak `encoding`. (Mine is en_US.UTF-8 due to my locale.) * `fileencoding` is the en…

vim does not disappoint with completeness. (:

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#119

Post by nobleach » Sat, Jul 20, 2019, 12:34 AM UTC

deergomoo wrote: post #62

emsy wrote: post #43

I rarely ever use actual vim, mostly when I'm in the terminal. But I have vim plugins for most IDEs I use (VS code, intellij, XCode). It makes editing so much faster. When I have to get by without it I feel as if someone put weights around my wrists. The reason I don't use Vim is because it's frankly not a smooth experience for most languages (unless you fiddle around a lot, and even then I found Ide+vim plug-in supe…

After a several month effort to learn vim bindings and use them full-time, I eventually ended up weaning myself back off because the plugins for the editors I actually use all seemed to come with considerable downsides. vscode-vim caused odd performance issues, and I encountered significant bugs with the undo stack (namely hitting 'u' would sometimes take out the last 10-15 changes instead of just one). IDEAvim would…

I too have been down this road. I tried Atom for a couple of months, and that turned into a couple of years. I had it tuned into a VERY NICE Vim. I tried out VSCodeVim and got it to be a mostly passable Vim. It sure is pretty though. I'm back on nvim for the time being. Coc.nvim and LSPs make it pretty good. There are definitely rough edges and memory usage is pretty bad with all those plugins, but. I know it, I feel right at home with it. The only other two editors I invested any real time learning were Sublime and Emacs (I did not try to turn them into Vim - but I did end up installing Evil for Emacs later on)

I'm pretty broken by Vim. I don't really want to invest the time to get really good at a non-modal text editor.

Re: History and Effective Use of Vim

#120

Post by bch » Sat, Jul 20, 2019, 12:50 AM UTC

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…

> :sh (go back to shell and do your thing and leave vim running)

In nvi (at least), one can also open a buffer and :script to run a shell inside vi and have all the yank/paste/navigation/all-the-things features of vi. Mind you need to i[nsert] or a[ppend] after the prompt to issue your commands.