Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

theregister.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 186 posts

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#161

Post by u801e »

Redoubts wrote: post #153
kmarc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine that SSH going from a Citrix windows desktop running on a Windows 10 VM on your linux laptop. Every key press reacts in around a second. Welcome to banking "security"! Now let's say I want to `d5}`, to delete the next 5 paraghraph. In vi(m) I can do this by telling it "hey vim, delete those 5 damn paragraph!" In fancy VScode I have to say more like... "Hey editor, wait a sec, I'm moving my cursor over the…

So if you have an incredibly shitty setup, and have no idea how vscode works, then it might be worth it. Got it.

There are also times when the available bandwidth is limited, so just having to use fewer keystrokes to edit a file speeds up the process. I was able to connect to remote linux servers over dial-up and edit files on those servers with vim without issue. Editing and saving over ssh was more of a hassle since it took longer to save the file (and I save pretty often).

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#162

Post by u801e »

zerr wrote: post #84
nouveaux wrote: post #58

For those who do not understand why people are fanatical about vi, here are some reasons: Vi is keyboard only. This means that actions with the mouse are optimized through the keyboard. There are "hotkeys" for most tasks you use with a mouse. Vi has the idea of objects. Words, lines and paragraphs are objects you can operate on. Vi defines a "language" for operating on objects. For instance, 'd' is delete. You can de…

What I observe is that most vim fans who swear by it use it as a bare bones editor, syntax highlighting at most. No auto-completion, go to definition or any other IDE stuff. Yes, it is possible to make vim IDE-like but very few do so.

> No auto-completion, go to definition or any other IDE stuff.

vim has had those features for many years now, so I'm not sure why people wouldn't make use of those features unless they aren't aware of them.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#163

Post by u801e »

acqq wrote: post #94
zerr wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I observe is that most vim fans who swear by it use it as a bare bones editor, syntax highlighting at most. No auto-completion, go to definition or any other IDE stuff. Yes, it is possible to make vim IDE-like but very few do so.

The existence of "modes" is also opposite to the approach which is know for decades to be less prone to accidental errors: having no modes and always being able to perform more undo steps. There were even the games of considering what plain text typed in wrong mode would cause the most of the damage. The main reason Vim and Emacs have their current followers is that the competing editors on Linux or Unix platforms ar…

> The existence of "modes" is also opposite to the approach which is know for decades to be less prone to accidental errors: having no modes and always being able to perform more undo steps.

vim has had the multi-level undo and redo for a number of years. If I really screw up, I can always run something like :earlier 5m to get back to the state I was at 5 minutes ago.

The only problem I have with some of the normal mode keystrokes is when I want to use some of the window based shortcuts and accidently press ctrl-w while my browser window is open (which closes the tab) :)

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#164

Post by j2kun »

u801e wrote: post #162
zerr wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I observe is that most vim fans who swear by it use it as a bare bones editor, syntax highlighting at most. No auto-completion, go to definition or any other IDE stuff. Yes, it is possible to make vim IDE-like but very few do so.

> No auto-completion, go to definition or any other IDE stuff. vim has had those features for many years now, so I'm not sure why people wouldn't make use of those features unless they aren't aware of them.

Tags! I do wish I knew how to use that feature better...

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#165

Post by pmoriarty »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #156
elteto wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have heard of evil by now... but if not check it out. It's a vim emulation layer for Emacs.

Yeah, I tried evil (and variants that used it), but the slight edge cases where it didn't quite work like vim messed me up enough to undermine its usefulness. Both in that I actually used things that it didn't provide, and in that hitting some places where it didn't work cast uncertainty over the whole thing: In vim, if I know a keybinding or command, it will work; in evil there was always a moment of "will that work…

With the exception of certain corner cases, when evil-mode doesn't exactly emulate vim it's considered a bug and should be reported as such.

I have run in to some of those corner cases myself, and had to ask myself whether they were worth giving up Emacs and evil for, and the answer for me that was that they weren't. Both are way too useful for me, and an occasional hiccup here and there isn't worth giving them up and going back to vim.

Also, I don't run in to those corner cases very often. Maybe 95% percent or more of the vim commands and features I use myself are completely emulated by evil without issues.

One other thing to ask yourself when running in to such cases is whether they're really an incompleteness in evil's vim emulation or maybe just a lack of a keybinding or some function that you could easily write yourself (if you know eLisp).

It's taken some elbow grease, but I've ironed out a lot of the wrinkles such as missing vim-like keybindings in modes that don't come with them by default (others use spacemacs or doom for this).

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#166

Post by codemusings »

steffan wrote: post #12

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.

It's a favorite pet peeve of mine (and very well represented in this thread) that people call it vi when they actually mean vim. I believe on some systems vi eventually became an alias for vim which is how all of this started.

Most folks would be very much irritated if they actually had to use vi because of some crucial features missing.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#167

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

Highly overrated, and I’ve been using Vim professionally (or vim emulators) for ten years now. I’m just used to the keys - muscle memory - but that’s it. (Its actually my first editor, my first job was at a place with a lot of vimsters)

There’s no proof that it makes you more productive or a better programmer. It’s actually gonna trip you up and get in your way if you don’t soup it up like an IDE

Downvote away

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#168

Post by kmarc »

Redoubts wrote: post #153
kmarc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine that SSH going from a Citrix windows desktop running on a Windows 10 VM on your linux laptop. Every key press reacts in around a second. Welcome to banking "security"! Now let's say I want to `d5}`, to delete the next 5 paraghraph. In vi(m) I can do this by telling it "hey vim, delete those 5 damn paragraph!" In fancy VScode I have to say more like... "Hey editor, wait a sec, I'm moving my cursor over the…

So if you have an incredibly shitty setup, and have no idea how vscode works, then it might be worth it. Got it.

I have a quite good setup, in general.

Unfortunately this is some external requirement I cannot do anything about. Also, as opposed to many people, I actually got to work and know both the IDE-world (including VScode), and the vim world. I have a base for comparison.

Hopefully you "got that" too.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#169

Post by kmarc »

wbkang wrote: post #134
kmarc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine that SSH going from a Citrix windows desktop running on a Windows 10 VM on your linux laptop. Every key press reacts in around a second. Welcome to banking "security"! Now let's say I want to `d5}`, to delete the next 5 paraghraph. In vi(m) I can do this by telling it "hey vim, delete those 5 damn paragraph!" In fancy VScode I have to say more like... "Hey editor, wait a sec, I'm moving my cursor over the…

vscode remote will actually perform better than vim over laggy ssh because the UI portion is completely local.

So it is with vim.

Anyway, unfortunately given setup won't even be viable with anything running "local", since in the mentioned citrix environment we cannot install anything, so no vscode, no local vim, no nothing...

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#170

Post by ralls_ebfe »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #121
wadkar wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try something like spacemacs[1] maybe and use it only for one specific task like org-mode[2]. That way, vim is still your daily driver, but you get to play with lisp/emacs on something very cool like org-mode! Then, you can slowly try to switch one thing at a time, for example start editing all Dockerfiles in spacemacs, or maybe do that one hello-world project/app in clojure/phoenix using spacemacs. See how you like…

Oh, that's a good idea:) And org-mode is compelling enough to entice me in... Thanks, I think I'll try that:)

I got into emacs because of org-mode. Transitioned from vim to spacemacs with evil-mode. Can recommend. :)
Post reply on HN