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Why I teach vim

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Re: Why I teach vim

#121

Post by hrktb »

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…

Interesting take. I came from a CS background but our school was mostly in emacs land on the surface (e.g. newcomer CLI tutorials included it as an upgrade from nano, and nothing on vi)

What brought vi to our attention was the holy war itself, and the sheer appeal to decide which camp we fit in.

50 years ago I think it’s a completely different story, but from the point BBS and shitposting were a thing, we got most information we needed on the net, including editor wars, linux distribution elitism, PHP and javascript and so many things.

It can be a kind of indirect mentorship, but I think even today a lot of people go try vim for the memes (and stay or not for the efficiency)

Re: Why I teach vim

#122

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

elygre wrote: post #108
bitcoinmoney wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link to the cheat sheet and coffee mug?

Googling for “vim coffee mug” provides reasonable hits.

Yeah, it might even return many similar products of varying quality, which is likely why the person you're replying to is asking which particular one they found useful.

Re: Why I teach vim

#123

Post by DennisP »

theonemind wrote: post #109
greggman3 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I got pretty good with vim. I'd say it was the fastest I could ever edit text. It really can be insanely fast for editing text but ultimately, I don't like vim. I don't spend that much time literally editing text, like a copy editor. I spend much more time typing and thinking, and very little editing. I can touch type both QWERTY and Dvorak. I usually type Dvorak, and the longer I type QWERTY, the more I get this men…

It worked out the opposite way for me. Using vim bindings keeps me in flow. If I don't have them I get aggravated, every time I have to slog through an inconvenient editing task because I changed my mind about some bit of code. It's not the seconds I save that makes me more productive, it's the mental state it helps me stay in.

It doesn't resonate with everybody, but I think it's going too far to say it's optimizing for the wrong thing.

Re: Why I teach vim

#124

Post by DennisP »

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…

A lot of us are fans of the keybindings more than Vim itself. For a long time my main editor was Visual Studio with Viemu.

Re: Why I teach vim

#125

Post by vulcan01 »

I started programming about 5-6 years ago (I'm a high school student). I started with VSCode, but about 1.5 years ago I switched to Vim for the simple reason that I wanted to live in the terminal. Unlike some other commenters here, I didn't know anyone else who used Vim (or Emacs for that matter), so I learned on my own... (:help is actually good in Vim, unlike many help menus in other software).

vimtutor does a great job introducing vim, and it took me about 1 hour or so to get started.

Re: Why I teach vim

#126

Post by Geminidog »

0x445442 wrote: post #113
Geminidog wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's less about the key mappings and more about the portability and lightweight nature of vim. So Clion runs on java and is really heavy while vim can be spun up instantly while you're sshed into any machine. I want both of these features combined.

Re: Why I teach vim

#127

Post by archgoon »

paradox_hunter wrote: post #111

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 i…

Unfortunately, vim macros don't tend to get implemented when other editors implement keybindings.

This is unfortunate, vim macros are fantastic for reformatting text.

Re: Why I teach vim

#128

Post by wander_homer »

IshKebab wrote: post #91
pritovido wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between a modal editor and a GUI one is that in the GUI one, the commands are organized in the menu and you access this mode(the menu display mode) by clicking instead of pressing a key. In fact, if you use shorcuts, they are the same thing. Modal editing is not hard. I learned vim and emacs without problems. Step by step, focusing on what was the next thing useful for me and learning it after that. No…

> Modal editing is not hard. ... Not harder than learning German or English or Chinese Mandarin. Oh sure, it's not hard at all when compared to something really hard ! > Do you believe that if people in Germany speak german fluently they are trying to signal anything to others? No they speak German because that's the easiest option for communicating with other people. Vim is not the easiest option for text editing. T…

>Oh sure, it's not hard at all when compared to something really hard!

I guess the point is that it's not as hard as many people make it seem. I switched from Sublime Text to vim and in a matter of one or two days I felt comfortable editing text with it and in contrast to other editors the learning curve quickly flattened, because you're actually learning a rather simplistic language with grammar and a small vocabulary, instead of memorizing key sequences which most of the time don't follow any logic.

> No they speak German because that's the easiest option for communicating with other people. Vim is not the easiest option for text editing.

What is the easiest option then? And I'm not talking about the easiest option during the first week, but afterwards (i.e. the majority of time).

Re: Why I teach vim

#129

Post by sundarurfriend »

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?

The Oni editor [1] based on NeoVim seems to be aimed at something like that.

> Onivim 2 aims to bring the speed of Sublime, the language integration of VSCode, and the modal editing experience of Vim together, in a single package.

Currently in alpha, but according to this blog [2] pretty usable and has support for VSCode plugins too.

[1] https://github.com/onivim/oni2 [2] https://seanchen1991.github.io/posts/onivim2/

Re: Why I teach vim

#130

Post by dfinninger »

archgoon wrote: post #127
paradox_hunter wrote: post #111

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 i…

Unfortunately, vim macros don't tend to get implemented when other editors implement keybindings. This is unfortunate, vim macros are fantastic for reformatting text.

Maybe not all of them, but you can use macros in IntelliJ and VSCode implementations (and, of course, Emacs).
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