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It does have a blood price, some days I spend just as much time hacking on my vimrc/plugins as the actual code I opened vim for.
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Hated Vi at first. Absolutely loathed it. I was all about emacs. But I gave vi another shot, and I'm so glad I did. The learning curve can be steep, and it's really unintuitive at first (or it was for me). But once it clicks a little bit, and you settle in.. Wow. I felt way more productive using it than any other editor.
(Helpful tip) map caps lock to escape: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
I started using emacs in the early 90s and got really into it during uni, studying CS a couple of years later. In mid 2000s I ended up in sysadmin work in a mixed Unix-environment (Tru64, AIX, Solaris, Linux) in a group where all other used (some Vi(m)-variant). I tried to get work done with emacs but failed due to various special characters always getting mangled in different ways over different terminals on differe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hated Vi at first. Absolutely loathed it. I was all about emacs. But I gave vi another shot, and I'm so glad I did. The learning curve can be steep, and it's really unintuitive at first (or it was for me). But once it clicks a little bit, and you settle in.. Wow. I felt way more productive using it than any other editor.
(Helpful tip) map caps lock to escape: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
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Alas, the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim.
I've always assumed the opposite with how people say emacs is a nice OS and poor editor... What does Vim over emacs?
vi and the ex editor language are part of the POSIX standard and were around early in the history of BSD. See the history here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
For a well worn joke on the subject, "Ed is the standard!": https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
Fast to start. I use Emacs for programming but if I have one single file, like a config file, that needs a quick edit, use vi(m) because otherwise I have to either:
1. Go to my open Emacs and navigate to the location of the file needing the quick edit 2. Open a second Emacs instance, and hope I don't lose the desktop settings for the "real" instance.
Especially if the file needs to be edited sudo.
If there is a way to open a file in the existing Emacs instance without navigating, I would be glad to use it except for sudo.
The way that "firefox some-local-file.html" will open up that file in the existing Firefox instance.
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Hated Vi at first. Absolutely loathed it. I was all about emacs. But I gave vi another shot, and I'm so glad I did. The learning curve can be steep, and it's really unintuitive at first (or it was for me). But once it clicks a little bit, and you settle in.. Wow. I felt way more productive using it than any other editor.
(Helpful tip) map caps lock to escape: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
Biggest downside is using someone else's keyboard. I've grown a nasty habit of hitting escape instinctually, every time I finish typing something. I turn on their caps lock so regularly! Still worth it though
Next question: Can you ahold an algorithm in your head? in the same concrete way you hold 'yypVr-'?
I'm lately quite interested in Array Languages and I'm reading some snippets of Apl/J/K. And the feeling is the same. Everything else looks so wasteful and error prone like the point-and-click looks to vimmers.
Example: Shuffling a vector – breaking ⍵ down into ⍺ pieces from which another vector is built by merging. E.g. if is 'abcdefghij' and is 3, the pieces are 'abcd', 'efg', and 'hij', and the result is 'aehbficgjd':
⍵[⍋⍋(⍴⍵)⍴⍳⍺]
The ergonomics are pretty different from what we're used to, but there's definitely an emergent property there. It's not just "it's shorter to type".
PS: I'm an emacs user (evil)
Speaking personally, I've been a professional developer for almost decade and even in my relatively short career I've seen a lot of technologies come and go. I was reluctantly roped into it by my first boss, an enthusiastic Vim advocate. And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective. From the default mac OS installation to some old Fedora box that has no…
Same here, and then i discovered EVIL, the vi layer for emacs. The best of all worlds: Vim text manipulation grammar over the emacs engine.
I frequently describe Spacemacs as a better vim than vim. Don't get me wrong, I've used vim for ages; I'll never stop editing server config with vi, nor will I stop getting mad when vi is actually vi and not vim.
But for a day to day code editor? Spacemacs is astonishingly good.
(Of course, Spacemacs is built on top of EVIL, as well as dozens of other packages. On the shoulders of giants, as we say.)