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Vim Creep (2011)

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Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#41

Post by Omnus »

markus_zhang wrote: post #34

I'll stick to an IDE. Modern IDEs are sophiscated enough that a Vim/Emacs newbie user probably needs years of practice and tons of plugins to match and go over its capabilities. I think Vim makes a lot of sense when 1) the machine doesn't have a proper IDE, and 2) you really do a lot of programming every day and you are young, like in 20s, so you can amortize the cost for longer time.

I am making a game. I use Vim (infinitely faster and more product than other text editors) and write a single command in my terminal to compile. Vim makes a lot of sense when you want to work fast and don't want bloated development toolchains to slow you down. There's nothing in modern IDEs that would increase my productivity that I can't add to Vim in about 5-20 minutes.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#42

Post by grecht »

If your editor makes you significantly more productive, maybe you're just writing boilerplate code, or something someone already implemented in a library. Touch typing is similar - it's useful because it removes some unnecessary barriers and thus makes the job more enjoyable, but it won't magically make you a better a programmer.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#43

Post by ysavir »

_0w8t wrote: post #27
simias wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO if you want an IDE use an IDE. There are a wealth of plugins that attempt more or less successfully to bring IDE-like features to VIM, but I'm not sure I see the point personally, it'll never be as seamless as an IDE built and maintained from the ground up to do these things. I hear that many IDEs have semi-competent Vim-style editing support, so maybe that would be more to your taste. If you want to try the Vim…

Without plugins Visual Studio Code in principle is just an editor. Yet even without any plugins or language-specific support it still a better tool for development out-of-the-box than Vim or Emacs. It can quick open and search across a development tree with thousands of files with no configuration. So as an editor for config files and small projects Vim without plugins is OK. But that basic Vim experience just does n…

> One does need plugins with Vim for anything big.

When a fresh shell tab is just a command-T/ctrl-T away, you don't need Vim to do any of these things in the first place. The point of Vim is that it's a text editor that lives in an environment where you can already accomplish everything other than text editing.

VSCode is a text editor that uses plugins to bring other programs into VSCode. Vim is a text editor plugin for an environment in which all those programs already run natively.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#44

Post by billfruit »

YesThatTom2 wrote: post #15

Truly a great story! Reminds me of this story... Two years ago I was collaborating with a coworker. Most of our time was in his office. I would look over his shoulder as he typed. He had recently adopted a new IDE and spent considerable time configuring it and learning its features. He was very proud of how productive it made him. Then one day we collaborated in my office instead. I use plain Unix tools, all independ…

In general though Emacs single handedly can do most of everything required in software development. One could practically spend all ones development time inside it, so I would say Emacs workflows are more impressive than Vi ones, especially since so much of great functionality is baked into it without even needing pluggins.

This I say after a couple of recent days in which the GUD gdb interface was a great help in solving a few of the problems I was working on. Does VI has something similar built in? Or for any of the common workflows like these which work out of the box, without needing plugins or extra configuration:

1. Remote file editing on other computers.

2. Rectangular/columnar text edits and manipulations.

3. Essentially infinite kill ring, i.e, a very easy to use copy-paste history: This I find is very useful, one becomes acustomed to building, blocks of text by assembling things from the kill ring. Also plays nice with point 4, easy macro record/replay.

4. Easy macro record/replay of even complicated edit sequences.

5.Inbuilt calculator, with both rpn and algebraic modes.

6. The Dir-ed mode provides a very convenient file manager.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#45

Post by jjice »

Probably the best second person POV story I've ever read. Very funny and I got a kick out of it. As a relatively new part time vim user (about a year), I felt portions of this. I still use VSCode for a handful of tasks, but Vim has taken over more and more.

This past semester I had to SSH into our CS servers for my OS class, and the way my group would work was usually me sharing my screen and us peer programming. There were multiple occasions my group partners would stop me and ask how dude something like remove a full line, put it in a register, and pasted it at the bottom of the file so fast.

ddgp

I love the reactions to it, because people get excited and I encourage them to try him themselves.

I'm also very much an amateur when it comes to vim. I love seeing vim masters in action, it's so interesting. I think I'll forever remain the right eyed character who asks "how did you do that?", and it's that sense of wonder that makes me love vim.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#46

Post by brobdingnagians »

grecht wrote: post #42

If your editor makes you significantly more productive, maybe you're just writing boilerplate code, or something someone already implemented in a library. Touch typing is similar - it's useful because it removes some unnecessary barriers and thus makes the job more enjoyable, but it won't magically make you a better a programmer.

I agree, but I think it is also like learning Lisp. I don't program in Lisp, but I think differently about some things because of it. Like code as a list that can be manipulated. Code as data, which is similar to Vim. Vim encourages thinking about things in terms of a language that represents structural units. I think more about how to code is structured rather than thinking about it as just freeform text with semantic meaning.

Whether that structural mindset helps with programming.... Dunno.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#47

Post by mkl »

jacknews wrote: post #20

Nice story, but :wq ? I've mapped ZZ to :w, ZX to :x, and QQ to ZQ / :q! to quit.

Yes. By default, ZZ is the same as :x (write if changed, then exit). Quicker and better than :wq.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#48

Post by scns »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #22
YesThatTom2 wrote: post #15

Truly a great story! Reminds me of this story... Two years ago I was collaborating with a coworker. Most of our time was in his office. I would look over his shoulder as he typed. He had recently adopted a new IDE and spent considerable time configuring it and learning its features. He was very proud of how productive it made him. Then one day we collaborated in my office instead. I use plain Unix tools, all independ…

My .bashrc is on a quest to turn my yakuake into the better half of vscode. "The shell is my IDE" is definitely true. Though Google takes up a worryingly large fraction of it. Wonder if there could be a shell tool to just dump the first stackoverflow hit for a search. bashrc highlights: https://gist.github.com/FeepingCreature/649588a2f6fa27c717bd... - ctrl-G for "directory up" - ctrl-E for "find and open in editor" (…

I have .. as an alias for cd ..

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#49

Post by codetrotter »

arendtio wrote: post #33
bgribble wrote: post #29

I’m a Vim user and proponent so don’t get me wrong here, but is “creep” in the title intended to be a description of what Vim does, or of the Vim user/protagonist? :)

Another option is 'the way in which vim spreads'

I thought it was going to be about installing too many plugins in Vim.

Re: Vim Creep (2011)

#50

Post by seszett »

billfruit wrote: post #44
YesThatTom2 wrote: post #15

Truly a great story! Reminds me of this story... Two years ago I was collaborating with a coworker. Most of our time was in his office. I would look over his shoulder as he typed. He had recently adopted a new IDE and spent considerable time configuring it and learning its features. He was very proud of how productive it made him. Then one day we collaborated in my office instead. I use plain Unix tools, all independ…

In general though Emacs single handedly can do most of everything required in software development. One could practically spend all ones development time inside it, so I would say Emacs workflows are more impressive than Vi ones, especially since so much of great functionality is baked into it without even needing pluggins. This I say after a couple of recent days in which the GUD gdb interface was a great help in so…

All these points are also natively handled by vim. Except for 5 which needs an external cli calculator.
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