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Why I teach vim

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Re: Why I teach vim

#41

Post by hankstenberg »

fergie wrote: post #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 envi…

This probably common, but there's also people like me, who stumble upon a problem like having to edit text files via ssh and end up falling in love with it. I came to vim that way some 15 years ago and to emacs (evil mode) two years ago. Both are simply awesome, powerful programs that are not hyped often, but by learning them you hopefully learn something to use for decades to come.

Re: Why I teach vim

#42

Post by Lio »

xenihn wrote: post #16
Lio wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 havi…

This is really cool, and I had no idea about Vim using a tree instead of a stack for undos. I'll check out Gundo. Do you have any other similar recs that would help for learning?

Drew Neil’s vimcasts.org is a mine of useful tips.

His book Practical Vim[1] is particularly good because it teaches you the “vim way” without plugins.

Not that there’s anything wrong with plugins, I use a load of them, but there’s loads you can do without them.

1. https://pragprog.com/titles/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-edit...

Re: Why I teach vim

#43

Post by pampa »

apocolyps6 wrote: post #22
pvg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really the same thing, compared to vi[m], emacs is statistically dead. And there are already lots of people who're well into their careers in academia and industry who aren't users of either. My own contrarian and probably equally wrong take is that it's mostly about accepting the (evidence-free) premise that modal editing is actually a good thing. It's hard, you suffer but lots of smart people tell you i…

The "suffering" has honestly been overblown by jokes about not being able to quit on one side and the mythologizing of the leet ninja 10x programmer who is only bound by his typing speed and can't waste time reaching for the mouse, on the other side. It continues to surprise me why people have such strong opinions about someone else's editor choice. My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc…

I suffer every time a linux distro has nano as the default editor. Cant save a file, cant exit, have to read the two bottom rows and figure out those alien shortcuts. yuck

Re: Why I teach vim

#44

Post by scruple »

fergie wrote: post #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 envi…

My mentor was a humble man from the Turkish countryside. He held dual masters in EE and CompEng. He knew vi because what else would he possibly know? It's what he learned in university. And, so, he taught me what he knew. I've mentored about 2 dozen people and I've taught them all vi(m). As far as I know, though, it's only stuck with 2 or 3 of them. C'est la vie.

Re: Why I teach vim

#45

Post by zozbot234 »

pvg wrote: post #40
Geminidog wrote: post #3

I 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?

does it really get to the point where it has everything that say CLion has? No, it doesn't. There are probably other reasons to try emacs but 'as capable as a JetBrains IDE' is not among them. As it stands right now I end up using both an IDE and vim. If you think of it not in terms of text editing but as "tool that operates on files" and "tool that operates on 'projects'", it makes more sense that many (most?) peopl…

I'm pretty sure that given enough yak-shaving, Emacs could be augmented with lots of IDE-like features that happen to be implemented in the main distribution, at least in some form. The question is whether you want to bother, given how obscure that whole area is.

Re: Why I teach vim

#46

Post by pampa »

arendtio wrote: post #29
cupofcoffee wrote: post #26

I used vim for some time could never really get into it. The benefits that it offers over other simple code editors like TextMate isn't really worth the learnign curve. It pretty much feels like a mini programming language for text editing.

I'm not so sure about that. Yes, I have the hard part of the learning curve behind me, but learning vim actually changed how I write code in a very positive way. Now, I think a lot more in terms of lines and e.g. rogue whitespaces happen rarely. I know that are tools who can remove them, but I want to illustrate, that the editor improved the quality of what I type. In the end, it depends how much time it will cost yo…

> In the end, it depends how much time it will cost you to learn vim

Is there really that much to learn? Open file, save file, exit, block select, copy paste, search and replace - thats about 99% of what you do in an editor. 15 minutes to pick up, ipossible to unlearn. Unless you have some other editor ingrained in your synapses. Switching between editors with different shortcuts is a torture.

Re: Why I teach vim

#47

Post by Lio »

cweagans wrote: post #24
saagarjha wrote: post #12

> I always tell my students that the one editor they are likely to find already installed on a machine is vim Well, vi, since it's part of POSIX. Unless you are fine with ed ;)

In many (most?) modern distros, vi is a symlink to vim.

There’s a vi clone in Busybox too, which whilst not Vim, is still really useful.

Re: Why I teach vim

#48

Post by gbrown_ »

apocolyps6 wrote: post #28
xenihn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really cool, and I had no idea about Vim using a tree instead of a stack for undos. I'll check out Gundo. Do you have any other similar recs that would help for learning?

vim generally doesn't need any of those fuzzy file finders that most people use. If you add set path+=** to your vimrc, and open vim from the top level directory for your project :find will just work Setting up ctags will give vim some IntelliSense-like functionality that people tend to miss from their IDEs. More info here: https://andrewra.dev/2011/06/08/vim-and-ctags/

> vim generally doesn't need any of those fuzzy file finders that most people use. If you add > > set path+=

Be wary of this, it can end up being quite slow. Here is an excellent write up detailing the usage of the path setting.

https://gist.github.com/romainl/7e2b425a1706cd85f04a0bd8b389...

Re: Why I teach vim

#49

Post by [deleted] »

hankstenberg wrote: post #41
fergie wrote: post #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 envi…

This probably common, but there's also people like me, who stumble upon a problem like having to edit text files via ssh and end up falling in love with it. I came to vim that way some 15 years ago and to emacs (evil mode) two years ago. Both are simply awesome, powerful programs that are not hyped often, but by learning them you hopefully learn something to use for decades to come.

[deleted]

Re: Why I teach vim

#50

Post by tincholio »

tikhonj wrote: post #5
Geminidog wrote: post #3

I 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…

This actually exists for Common Lisp: https://common-lisp.net/project/lispbox/

It would probably be doable for other languages, if you were so inclined

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