Why I teach vim
blog.ceos.io
Why I teach vim
1–10 of 185 posts
Re: Why I teach vim
#2Would this author happen to have a blog post of how they teach it? I'm curious.
Re: Why I teach vim
#3I really wish there was a batteries included vim-like console editor with all the power of the jet brains suite of IDEs and convenience and lightness of vim.
As it stands right now I end up using both an IDE and vim.
Maybe emacs is the answer but honestly if I look past all the yak-shaving to get emacs to the power level of an IDE does it really get to the point where it has everything that say CLion has?
Re: Why I teach vim
#4I really wish there was a batteries included vim-like console editor with all the power of the jet brains suite of IDEs and convenience and lightness of vim. As it stands right now I end up using both an IDE and vim. Maybe emacs is the answer but honestly if I look past all the yak-shaving to get emacs to the power level of an IDE does it really get to the point where it has everything that say CLion has?
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Re: Why I teach vim
#5I really wish there was a batteries included vim-like console editor with all the power of the jet brains suite of IDEs and convenience and lightness of vim. As it stands right now I end up using both an IDE and vim. Maybe emacs is the answer but honestly if I look past all the yak-shaving to get emacs to the power level of an IDE does it really get to the point where it has everything that say CLion has?
I'm not sure about the specifics, but providing something a lot more "batteries-included" seems to be the idea behind Emacs distributions like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs.
One difficulty is that language-specific tools (language servers, linters... etc) are standalone pieces of software with their own dependencies, requirements... etc. It's hard to bundle together a fully "batteries-included" Emacs without figuring out a way to manage native software and services.
I think this is one place where Nix can be a real advantage: even if you don't care about Nix's reproducibility, it's ability to manage Emacs, Emacs packages and language-specific tools is pretty unparalleled. If I had some more time on my hands, I would try putting together a Nix-based Emacs "distribution" with some easy way to configure which languages you want to work with. Coupled with lsp-mode and language-servers, this has some real potential!
Re: Why I teach vim
#6Would this author happen to have a blog post of how they teach it? I'm curious.
Ya that would be really helpful. I've picked up bits and pieces of vim over the years. Recently, I even installed vimium on Chrome and the vim extension for VS Code in an attempt to get better at it.
It has been quite effortless to delete or replace words or lines but every time I've tried getting more adventurous with it - say, surround every line of text with double quotes etc, I end up finding the commands unintuitive or hard to remember.
There's also an issue with my older muscle memory of `CMD+Z` which works on a different stack than `u` and `CTRL+R` and I end up messing up my code.
Re: Why I teach vim
#7I really wish there was a batteries included vim-like console editor with all the power of the jet brains suite of IDEs and convenience and lightness of vim. As it stands right now I end up using both an IDE and vim. Maybe emacs is the answer but honestly if I look past all the yak-shaving to get emacs to the power level of an IDE does it really get to the point where it has everything that say CLion has?
I'm not sure about the specifics, but providing something a lot more "batteries-included" seems to be the idea behind Emacs distributions like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs. One difficulty is that language-specific tools (language servers, linters... etc) are standalone pieces of software with their own dependencies, requirements... etc. It's hard to bundle together a fully "batteries-included" Emacs without figuring out…
Emacs mostly has problems with external language servers because its plugin model is archaic and brittle to a large extent compared to that of say VS Code. It's also far more flexible but with power comes responsibility, and I've found Emacs extensions far more likely to interfere with each other than in less composable editors. You don't need Nix to fix this problem.
Re: Why I teach vim
#8"I wish I could say I agonized over all the options at the time and decided vim was the best pedagogical solution, but the reality of the situation was that vi was what I used in college because my father taught me vi"
We dont talk about this much, but many of us hardcore Vi/Emacs users have had this knowledge imparted to us from a mentor. Thats probably why the use of Vi/Emacs is much higher in established tech environments (universities, big dotcoms), where there tends to be a tradition of mentorship than it is elsewhere. If anyone is looking for a slightly off-the-wall masters thesis, I'm fairly certain that you could extrapolate this out into a class divide- perhaps richer/more-established/well-educated users are proportionally more likely to use Vi/Emacs, and in some ways use them as "gatekeeping" tools?
Re: Why I teach vim
#9I really wish there was a batteries included vim-like console editor with all the power of the jet brains suite of IDEs and convenience and lightness of vim. As it stands right now I end up using both an IDE and vim. Maybe emacs is the answer but honestly if I look past all the yak-shaving to get emacs to the power level of an IDE does it really get to the point where it has everything that say CLion has?
I'm not sure about the specifics, but providing something a lot more "batteries-included" seems to be the idea behind Emacs distributions like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs. One difficulty is that language-specific tools (language servers, linters... etc) are standalone pieces of software with their own dependencies, requirements... etc. It's hard to bundle together a fully "batteries-included" Emacs without figuring out…
I'm positive some sadist somewhere in this world has all the software on their OS as a nix expression. I'm also positive that at least one of these people has a fully featured emacs IDE and all the required dependencies as part of that expression.
Totally down to try it if anyone has it.
One thing good about just standalone vim though is how portable it is. I can ssh into any server and fire it up. I also want this for a IDE. I want a console level IDE to fire up on any server I ssh into and if it's not in that server I want to be able to use any package manager to DL it easily.
I can't see any editor/IDE solve the above problem unless the editor becomes the ssh client itself. With that setup in place then my IDE can go anywhere.
Re: Why I teach vim
#10Would this author happen to have a blog post of how they teach it? I'm curious.
Ya that would be really helpful. I've picked up bits and pieces of vim over the years. Recently, I even installed vimium on Chrome and the vim extension for VS Code in an attempt to get better at it. It has been quite effortless to delete or replace words or lines but every time I've tried getting more adventurous with it - say, surround every line of text with double quotes etc, I end up finding the commands unintui…
I guess I’ve got used to working with both sets of shortcuts but I miss the Vim undo system in other apps.
It’s worth noting that u and ctrl-r don’t operate on an undo stack but on an undo tree.
So if you have a series of edits and undo them all then do something else you can still get back to where you were before.
Use g+ and g- to walk the tree and the Gundo plugin is gives you a nice visual diff interface.
So having a separate shortcut and “stack” is actually a great feature of Vim IMHO.