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Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim

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Re: Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim

#101

Post by loxs »

moonchild wrote: post #70
rubyn00bie wrote: post #7

Two things that helped me more than anything with "learning" vim and or ever wanting to use it: 1. Remap your "capslock" key to "escape." Vi was written using an ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap "capslock" to "escape" when pressed alone, and "ctrl" when pressed with…

> Remap your "capslock" key to "escape." I hear this recommendation a lot. You can do that, but much better is to get a keyboard with a proper thumb cluster like a kinesis[1], maltron[2], dactyl[3], ... Much better to put such a common key on the thumb than stress out a pinky. I have a kinesis, and have esc mapped to the 'end' key there; similar positioning is possible on other keyboards. The keyboards I linked are a…

For me it was enough to just remap my right Alt to Ctrl. No need for expensive hardware which I can't bring with me everywhere. The ThinkPad keyboard is good enough.

Re: Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim

#102

Post by chongli »

atweiden wrote: post #72
chongli wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I use them with the f and F keys. They repeat the previous character search in forward and backward directions.

I find rhysd/clever-f [1] to be more DWIM than Vim's default f/F. " 0: F is backward search, and repeating f after F searches in the same direction " 1: F is backward search, and repeating F after F searches in the same direction let g:clever_f_fix_key_direction = 1 [1] https://github.com/rhysd/clever-f.vim

I try not to use vim plug-ins where built in functionality will suffice. I’ve trained vim’s default behaviour into my muscle memory so I’m fine with it. In fact, I used plain old vi (technically Keith Bostic’s nvi [1]) for years and sometimes I find myself preferring it.

I think a lot of people who use vim end up with a ton of unnecessary plugins and they aren’t even aware of half the functionality of plain vi. I might just be a weird minimalist though.

[1] https://sites.google.com/a/bostic.com/keithbostic/vi/

Re: Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim

#103

Post by deltron3030 »

kranner wrote: post #87
lmohseni wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Linux and Mac it’s possible to have caps be escape when pressed alone or control when pressed with another key. On Linux the software is called xcape. :)

On Mac, there is Karabiner-Elements. https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

Here's a Karabiner tutorial that worked for me: https://medium.com/@pechyonkin/how-to-map-capslock-to-contro...

Re: Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim

#104

Post by jen729w »

lalaithion wrote: post #89
cecida wrote: post #55

I'm not trying to be contrarian here, but why would someone continue to use Vim and Emacs when all of its lovely features have been integrated into products like VCode? It just reminds me of serious men with beards working on mainframes and AIX power systems when I started my career.

Sure, I use VSCode and Intellij and all the beautiful modern IDEs. But I use them with Vim keybindings turned on. Because extremely common things that you do while programming are extremely quick for me to do with vim commands. ci" == delete everything within these quotes, and put me in insert mode. vi{:%s/old_var_name/new_var_name/g == rename a variable within a block qaI" A", jq == make a new macro to quote a line…

Just started doing this for RSI reasons. Not having to constantly reach down to those arrow keys is fabulous.

Re: Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim

#105

Post by owl57 »

pessimizer wrote: post #91
atweiden wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I'm a bit spoiled by primarily using Vim to write code and prosé in American English. Vim's digraph feature (Ctrl-K by default) has handled unicode char input nicely enough for me, but I wonder if the compose key could be of use when writing text in Japanese for example.

I actually meant to do it systemwide, for when you're writing or googling things not in English, or when you want to write a fancy ⅝. The day I have to start putting diacritics into computer code is the day I quit programming:) I think it's no good for Japanese, but I know very little about Japanese input. Romanji is still Japanese, right?

Now that's an idea. Haskellers routinely use x' as a variable name, but ẋ and x̃ are also valid ones!

Re: Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim

#106

Post by SPBS »

fizzled wrote: post #37
rubyn00bie wrote: post #7

Two things that helped me more than anything with "learning" vim and or ever wanting to use it: 1. Remap your "capslock" key to "escape." Vi was written using an ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap "capslock" to "escape" when pressed alone, and "ctrl" when pressed with…

I think this is a bad idea because remapping keys has significant consequences with compatibility as you develop across more platforms. A good vi user is trying to build universal muscle memory, and making personal exceptions kinda ruins the efficacy of the editor. For example: I switch between dozens of computers, some are transient VMs or cloud instances, and I cannot afford the time (or simply cannot alter the sys…

I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. I have a lot of keybindings but I always make sure I can survive without them, such as by dropping into vanilla vim to once in a while to do work and ensuring I'm not completely lost. A user in the vim subreddit refers to this as 'sharpening the saw'.

Re: Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim

#107

Post by sassyboy »

semicolonandson wrote: post #10

For the vim enthusiasts reading, I'd like to bring to your attention some other resources released in the last few months — ThePrimeagen (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8ENHE5xdFSwx71u3fDH5Xw — Vim Tricks (newsletter/Twitter): https://vimtricks.com/ — and humbly, myself, Semicolon&Sons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=futay9NjOac&list=PLpkoC9yJXD...

+100 for ThePrimagen on Youtube. His videos are great for people looking to get started with Vim.

Re: Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim

#108

Post by 91edec »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #17

I started Vim when the internet went out once and, bored, I finally tried `vimtutor` on the debian command line. It just opens vim to a txt file that incrementally explains how to make basic edits. I was instantly hooked when I realized how much time "o" and "O" alone would save me over. I almost never use Vim these days because I was too lazy to port my .vimrc + Vundle plugins to a new laptop at some point, but I us…

Just set up a dotfiles config with git and pull it on all your devices.

Re: Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim

#109

Post by Lio »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #7

Two things that helped me more than anything with "learning" vim and or ever wanting to use it: 1. Remap your "capslock" key to "escape." Vi was written using an ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap "capslock" to "escape" when pressed alone, and "ctrl" when pressed with…

On remapping caps:

ctrl-[ is escape in terminals by default.

It’s often easier to map caps to ctrl than escape when pressed and ctrl when held. Most OSs support that without extra software.

Even in Vim it’s still very useful to have a convenient ctrl key. A lot of useful features make use of Ctrl in Vim.

On remapping leader:

Remapping to spacebar means your thumbs are dedicated to that operation. That’s more balanced left-right for touch typing.

Also you get to keep the default behaviour.

Re: Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim

#110

Post by Lio »

atweiden wrote: post #69
rubyn00bie wrote: post #7

Two things that helped me more than anything with "learning" vim and or ever wanting to use it: 1. Remap your "capslock" key to "escape." Vi was written using an ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap "capslock" to "escape" when pressed alone, and "ctrl" when pressed with…

Die hard vimeleon here. IMHO chording the 'j' and 'k' keys simultaneously [1] is a severely underutilized solution for escape. Try it. You'll love it. If you're going to rebind capslock to something — and this is particularly true if you're on macOS — rebind it to backspace. Capslock escape isn't useful outside of Vim. Backspace is useful everywhere, including inside Vim. [1] https://github.com/kana/vim-arpeggio

The problem with your jk solution is that it doesn’t work in other Vi-like interfaces such as those provided by readline or shells.

Also ctrl-h is backspace so mapping caps to ctrl gives you a convenient escape and backspace shortcut.

(It also gives you a heap more terminal shortcuts but that’s another story).

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