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Why I teach vim

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Re: Why I teach vim

#111

Post by paradox_hunter »

What most people forget when they argue against learning vim is that vim is more that just a text editor, it's a whole new philosophy. Once you learn it, you can find it almost everywhere. Learning vim key-bindings was the first thing I did after learning to touch-type, and now I use the same key-bindings on VSCode, Intellij, a remote server I am SSHed into and with the help of Vimimum, even chrome!

And if ubiquity isn't enough, then I would point you to this article which does an awesome job explaining the really idea of vim, composability.

https://medium.com/@mkozlows/why-atom-cant-replace-vim-43385...

Re: Why I teach vim

#112

Post by gen220 »

greggman3 wrote: post #100
gtsop wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc, in that its a personal choice that some are public about. This is not a good theory. Surely, this effect appears wherever you've got conflicting choices about what is best, but there are always reasonable arguments on why you should do X over Y. And you know, there are always people who respect other's choices. I am a vim user and I 100% understa…

I am curious if any vim user has ever been able to see the benefits of other environments. I know I have never been able to see the benefits of vim. Part of me wants to give a try for 3-6 months just to prove to myself that it's all bullshit and that vim is just another editor. In any case. For a long time I was a fan of my editor of choice, slickedit. It definitely has a few features I use for which I don't know the…

From my perspective there are two sticky elements to vim, where once you’re accustomed to exploiting them, you find it very difficult to leave.

The first (chronologically speaking, for most people) is modal editing. Most popular editors today support vim bindings. So this bulwark is gradually eroding.

The second is the automation. Any piece of your workflow can be captured and remapped to a couple keystrokes.

Some other editor might innovate a new feature that vanilla vim doesn’t have (in fact this occurs regularly).

The (not unique in idea, but in implementation) power of vim is not any superficial feature, it’s the meta feature of extensibility, and how this is interwoven with the modal editor idea.

I think many people who come to vim and then leave it for another editor get the first idea, but never got used to the second idea, or never got around to integrating the two.

Re: Why I teach vim

#113

Post by 0x445442 »

Geminidog wrote: post #92
pvg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I can think of it that way. But I don't want to. I want a batteries included ide as lightweight as vim and as powerful as Clion, not two tools. Currently you see a bunch of programmers divided into two camps. Those that prefer the vimish style and those that don't want to deal with the yak shaving and prefer tons of features. The thing is these qualities are not actually tradeoffs in principle they are only trad…

Why not the IntelliJ Vim plugin with Clion? I think the better distinction is Vim for editing text, IDE for performing non text editing tasks.

Re: Why I teach vim

#114

Post by lisper »

alblue wrote: post #110
monkeycantype wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to say one thing in defence of vegans, you only know about the vegans who tell you they are vegans. These people are actually the people-who-like-to-tell-you-they-are-vegans. There a lot of vegans who don't eat animal products and just leave it at that. Like my partner who just cooked me an anchovy pizza. You never hear about the just-a-vegan-and-god-knows-why-you'd-want-to-tell-everyone, because they creep th…

But anchovy is a fish ... how is that not eating animals?

You missed the point. The partner who made the pizza didn’t eat it.

Re: Why I teach vim

#115

Post by gen220 »

pvg wrote: post #25
rgoulter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's mostly about accepting the (evidence-free) premise that modal editing is actually a good thing. Kakoune's development has started fairly recently. The oldest tags on its GitHub repo are for 2018. I think this defies "people want to continue the legacy of actually-not-that-great thing because I had do suffer, so other people should too". I think you'd only put into making/promoting Kakoune if you genuinely thou…

Oh once you've suffered, there's a huge, inexorable incentive to believe you haven't suffered in vain! Completely agree with you that the belief is genuine and sincere. I just don't happen to think it has much basis beyond its authenticity and sincerity.

I think there’s been a conflation in this thread between suffering and struggle. It’s possible to have one without the other. Struggle is a requirement for learning very useful things.

It’s entirely possible to learn modal editing without suffering but it’s not likely to learn it without struggling, given how most people are raised on the mouse.

Re: Why I teach vim

#116

Post by Nginx487 »

In early 2000th I used to admin quite diverse network, including rare and exotic *nix systems, early Sun machines and HP-UX. One thing I was sure about - every of them had 'vi' after installation.

Re: Why I teach vim

#117

Post by MikeTheGreat »

alblue wrote: post #110
monkeycantype wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to say one thing in defence of vegans, you only know about the vegans who tell you they are vegans. These people are actually the people-who-like-to-tell-you-they-are-vegans. There a lot of vegans who don't eat animal products and just leave it at that. Like my partner who just cooked me an anchovy pizza. You never hear about the just-a-vegan-and-god-knows-why-you'd-want-to-tell-everyone, because they creep th…

But anchovy is a fish ... how is that not eating animals?

I had to stop and think about that, too :)

I think what the poster meant was "My partner is a vegan (implication: they would never eat anchovies), but they just made me an anchovy pizza so that I can eat my non-vegan food happily." I.e., their partner doesn't eat animal products but the partner isn't judging their choice to eat animal products.

Re: Why I teach vim

#118

Post by arccy »

Geminidog wrote: post #9
tikhonj wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

you could consider sshfs

Re: Why I teach vim

#119

Post by magoghm »

I learned to use vi because it was the only full screen editor available in the Unix machines I was using in 1983. At that time, I occasionally still used ed for simple edits because I didn't want to wait for vi to startup :)

Re: Why I teach vim

#120

Post by bananamerica »

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?

Emacs is not an IDE, it’s a multipurpose tool with many of the same features commonly associated with IDEs. Spacemacs and Doom Emacs (my recommendation) are highly useful distributions that make a lot easier to achieve that goal.

But, even so, Emacs will still not be an actual IDE like those made by JetBrains.

You sacrifice some specificity for a world of flexibility.

An IDE-like Vim would be a negation of everything that Vim stands for. I don’t see any point in that.

If you really need an IDE, just use one.

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