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How Did Vim Become So Popular?

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Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#271

Post by skohan »

raxxorrax wrote: post #268

Perhaps a mix of choice supportive bias after going through the pain of learning it and stockholm syndrome? Jokes aside, I don't really work with VIM but understand the concepts and have mastered basic usage of changing text files without too much effort. Never really coded in VIM aside from small scripts. But it is a dependable text editor that survived the ages. Most modern IDE will never reach this because they ar…

Yeah I think ubiquity is a huge part of it. I think I'm at a similar level as you: I mostly use it for quick edits or when using ssh for example, but the fact that I know I will basically always have access to it makes it a good default choice.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#272

Post by devnonymous »

airstrike wrote: post #166
duckfruit wrote: post #36

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…

I dream of the day when Excel will have a vim mode... My life will finally be complete.

Perhaps you should give sc-im a go. It's no excel but a good enough spreadsheet with vim like keybindings.

https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#273

Post by imtringued »

dhmiller wrote: post #206
ricksharp wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, also am curious about multi-insertion with cntr-left/right that vscode does: For example, let’s say I have a json object with variety of field names, one per line and I want to remove the quotes. With vscode, I can alt select all lines, Home Ctrl+right del cntl+right del. The trick is the field names are different length, does vim have multi-edit with the ability to navigate relative to each insertion point? Edit…

There are things that vim does better. There are things that VS Code does better. There are things that Visual Studio does better. You can memorize all sorts of things about your particular editor of choice and you will be more efficient and effective in that editor. If I wanted to cherry pick examples of what vim does better, I could start all of them with, "first ssh into a random server." What makes vim great is t…

sshing into a server invalidates all the time you spent on customizing your local vim.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#274

Post by Lio »

ryan-allen wrote: post #270
Lio wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Funnily enough ctrl-[ is one of my most used shortcuts in vim. It’s a convenient alternative to escape if you map caps-lock to ctrl)

I've been using ctrl-[ for years, but have been experimenting with jj. Now I'm not sure which one I like better! I switched back to vim+tmux (nvim) a few weeks ago from a number of years using vs-code with the vim keybindings. I'm still trying to configure my plugins so that I don't feel like I'm repeating myself too often.

Having ctrl-[ in your muscle memory has the advantage that it also works in other readline programs that have a vi like interfacee, e.g. bash, zsh and many db consoles.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#275

Post by akho »

ricksharp wrote: post #194
pengaru wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's too many little things to mention, they do all add up to be quite significant in the course of programming. Here's a tiny sample of some stuff I use constantly: Move cursor forward word at a time: w ignoring punctuation: W reverse: b B Move cursor to next occurrence of character Z: fZ reverse: FZ Delete forward to next occurrence of character Z: dfZ reverse: dFZ Change forward to next occurrence of character…

Thanks for the feedback. vscode has regex find replace, but I don’t use it very often. It does show every match highlighted in the current file while entering the find value, which is nice. It does the same for multi files if needed and gives a nice preview of every change. Word navigation I use a great deal (especially with multi-cursor editing). Ctrl+left/right jumps words, home, end to begin end of line. Ctrl+f Z…

Ctrl-arrows is not the same thing as vim’s wordwise movement. If you need to go 5 words forward, it’s 5w ; if you want to capitalize the next 3 words, gU3w ; the point is composability, not a single operation. Same goes for f.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#276

Post by Lio »

slim wrote: post #224
Lio wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Funnily enough ctrl-[ is one of my most used shortcuts in vim. It’s a convenient alternative to escape if you map caps-lock to ctrl)

You may be using vim wrong. Good for you if you like it that way

You're going to have to explain that one because I generally switch back to command mode after every edit so I use ctrl-[ a lot.

I'd be VERY interested to hear why that's wrong and what you do differently.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#277

Post by Lio »

teddyh wrote: post #247
Lio wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Funnily enough ctrl-[ is one of my most used shortcuts in vim. It’s a convenient alternative to escape if you map caps-lock to ctrl)

Note: Often Ctrl-3 does the same thing.

That's excellent!

That gives a left handed option for escape without leaving the home row. I really like having mirrored shortcuts like that, thank you.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#278

Post by sieste »

ryan-allen wrote: post #270
Lio wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Funnily enough ctrl-[ is one of my most used shortcuts in vim. It’s a convenient alternative to escape if you map caps-lock to ctrl)

I've been using ctrl-[ for years, but have been experimenting with jj. Now I'm not sure which one I like better! I switched back to vim+tmux (nvim) a few weeks ago from a number of years using vs-code with the vim keybindings. I'm still trying to configure my plugins so that I don't feel like I'm repeating myself too often.

I recommend mapping jk to esc in insert mode (instead of jj), so you remain on the same line if you accidentally use it in normal mode.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#279

Post by dkns »

the_jeremy wrote: post #69
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim.

I am also surprised by this. What are you basing it on? For arbitrarily comparable online communities, it looks like emacs.stackexchange.com is twice as active as vi.stackexchange.com

Stack Overflow survey (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e...) has Vim at ~25% while Emacs is at 4.5%.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#280

Post by The-Compiler »

RMPR wrote: post #209
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like vimium, you may also like qutebrowser. It's built with keyboard bindings from the ground up, and is keyboard-first. I can browse most sites without taking my hands off the home row.

I use both QuteBrowser and Firefox with Vim Vixen, one of the thing that make me reluctant to switch completely are mostly addons, Multi-Container, cookies auto delete, ublock origin, Privacy Badger, ... I can't browse the Internet without those, and the built-in adblocker of QB is unfortunately not that performant. Also, you can't use the keyboard everywhere (thanks to the modern web) Random example off the top of m…

> and the built-in adblocker of QB is unfortunately not that performant

With "performant", I assume you mean "how well it works", not "how fast it works"?

FWIW a better adblocker is in progress: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/5317

> Also, you can't use the keyboard everywhere (thanks to the modern web) Random example off the top of my head: https://questions.wizardzines.com/event-loops.html

Yay... You can always customize the hints.selectors setting to add selectors for those (for websites you use a lot).

There are also some thoughts on how to add hints to all elements with a JS click handler, but I haven't had a chance to take a closer look yet: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/4817

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