31–40 of 186 posts
It's amazing how fast one can edit text with vi once you get all the keys down. There used to be a video game that taught how to use VI. Is it still around?
vi has been life changing. Learning vi altered my entire concept of what interacting with text could be, and even my personal physical relationship with a keyboard. Using vi is like driving a stick shift; satisfying in the depth of control once the learning curve is done. vi has been a daily friend now for over 20 years. So much insight is cooked into those little key mappings.
Just a point of historical order, didn't those key mappings mostly come from ed? Aka Ken Thompson and Ritchie?
I used Emacs for 5 years before learning vi. What a change! While Emacs tries to put the kitchen sink inside the editor, vi tries simply to be a keyboard interface to the rest of the system. I've never looked back since I learned this way of working.
> simply to be a keyboard interface to the rest of the system Can you expand more on what you mean by that? It's never really clicked with me what the exact value prop of vim is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've tried several times to get into vim. I feel like it's similar to dvorak though - unless you use it 24/7 you won't develop the muscle memory necessary to use it efficiently.
Using it 12/7 was enough for me for me to be become proficient. ;)
I used Emacs for 5 years before learning vi. What a change! While Emacs tries to put the kitchen sink inside the editor, vi tries simply to be a keyboard interface to the rest of the system. I've never looked back since I learned this way of working.
> simply to be a keyboard interface to the rest of the system Can you expand more on what you mean by that? It's never really clicked with me what the exact value prop of vim is.
I used Emacs for 5 years before learning vi. What a change! While Emacs tries to put the kitchen sink inside the editor, vi tries simply to be a keyboard interface to the rest of the system. I've never looked back since I learned this way of working.
I've tried several times to get into vim. I feel like it's similar to dvorak though - unless you use it 24/7 you won't develop the muscle memory necessary to use it efficiently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use command mode a lot, so have swapped ":" and ";". With that, :x + enter is 3 keystrokes, and hitting x is a bit easier than hitting z.
I aliased it so either : or ; work for : I admit I typed :wq for more than a decade before learning about :x
Let's not forget Bram Moolenaar, who also deserves credit for extending the work on Vi. Vim [Vi iMproved] is likely (along with NeoVim) the actual Vi editor most people are using these days.
What's the story with NeoVim exactly? I am trying it out on Linux because I got some recommendations that it's better than Vim, but I've run into some problems because for instance with setting up plugins and things, lots of times the documentation seems to be geared toward Vim, and sometimes I've gotten errors it's hard to figure out because of this. It kind of gives me the perception there just aren't that many peo…
https://github.com/vim/vim - 20k https://github.com/neovim/neovim - 36.5k
This is in some part due to the fact that neovim has been on Github longer, but it's still a a major indicator.
Neovim has many benefits over Vim, and has been applying pressure on Vim for years to improve its own development and codebase. Nvim has first class support for Lua outside of Vimscript, which has enabled a lot of people to write more powerful plugins. A lot of NVim's featureset has been copied into Vim over the years (one of my favorites is the hover window, which has allowed IDE like support for code references/comments/source). Supposedly, Nvim's codebase is significantly easier to maintain and contribute to, due to the nature of having a community of contributors that built it from ground up, as opposed to one primary developer working on Vim.
The parity has reduced over the years, but Nvim has been significantly ahead in pushing new features and active development over Vim resting on its laurels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> simply to be a keyboard interface to the rest of the system Can you expand more on what you mean by that? It's never really clicked with me what the exact value prop of vim is.
Vim gives a consistent and quick interface to editing operations based on a set of standard keys with modifiers. But it doesn't try to be everything to everyone. "plugins" for vi, at least in the classic sense, tend to be minimal. The editor relies more on integration with the UNIX ecosystem. This makes vi unlimited in its possibilities, without having to rely on thousands of lines of lisp code, like emacs does.
Millions actually.
I'm an emacs user (who does not want to get into an editor war, mmkay). The plugins are so useful. I'm just learning magit and it very much takes most of the evil and hostility out of Git and I really like it. I also have dired (a sophisticated directory editor), and about to learn loads more such as Bookmark+ which allows links and jumps to anything you set, and allows you to save your desktop layout and files.
Emacs has so much, if only you can find it (align-regexp is very useful but there is so much more). Edit: look up M-x occurs if you haven't met it. Mega useful.
Consistency is going to be lost as you add functionality. If Vim doesn't have that problem it will in time.
Emacs isn't perfect, the package library melpa has dubious quality software, but emacs really is very good indeed.