Would this author happen to have a blog post of how they teach it? I'm curious.
Why I teach vim
51–60 of 185 posts
Re: Why I teach vim
#52"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…
I knew no one that was openly proficient in Vim when I picked it up. In my studies, I was already one of the two to three odd-one-outs who used Linux (>90% of students and professors didn't know anything besides Windows).
I bought an ARM-based chromebook, installed crouton and... quickly discovered, that nothing besides Vim/Emacs came pre-built for it. There even wasn't a simple, official way to build Electron (so all those editors weren't an option, either)!
So you could say, I only picked them up (I tried both) reluctantly. And I stuck to Vim-bindings because all other alternatives I know suck in comparison. The best I knew beforehand w.r.t flexibility was Sublime Text with its multiple cursors and regex searches, but that also pales when compared to Vim macros.
Make of that what you will. I'm certain your point about mentors isn't wrong, but it doesn't explain it all, too.
Also, if anyone could point me to similarly promising editing schemes, I'd be glad to have a look at them :)
Re: Why I teach vim
#53I 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.
Re: Why I teach vim
#54"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…
Re: Why I teach vim
#55"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…
Re: Why I teach vim
#56"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…
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…
I can somewhat understand "don't have to touch the mouse" as that's a personal preference for them (even though IDEs have key binds too, I think they blow up that argument way too much) but on anything else they are suspiciously silent. Maybe I have just not met the right people to ask but that's my personal experience. Anyone I know using vim only does it because they either have been using it for 40 years or have been told to use it by someone from the first group and don't know anything else.
Re: Why I teach vim
#57"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.
But I have not switched to emacs(evil mode ofc.) due to mostly philosophical differences and i completely just hate the defaults..
Re: Why I teach vim
#58Earlier 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 don’t think it’s all overblown. With a GUI editor if you’re not efficient with it you can fall back to using a mouse until you know enough shortcuts. With vim if you don’t know enough of the controls for even basic navigation you can’t do much, the learning curve will always be steeper, and some people don’t want to go through that even if it pays off in the end.
Re: Why I teach vim
#59Why I started to use Vim 5 years ago. I was coding a lot and I realised most of my work was editing code as text. So I figured, why not become really freaking good at it? Vim has a steep learning curve because it's a mental paradigm shift. I personally would recommend it to everyone because although no-code is taking off, most of the developers are still editing text. Sharpen that saw!
I don't see any evidence for that.
Re: Why I teach vim
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For example, `2dw` is a typical example. So you start with the number of times you want to do something, then you add a verb like `d` for delete and you end with a noun like `w` for word. As you probably have guessed, it deletes the next two words.
Since working with lines is quite common, many commands are executed for a line when you repeat the verb (easy to type). So `2dd` deletes the next two lines.
When you use this language you start using vim. There is still more to explore (e.g. macros), but this is where vim is different.