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History and effective use of Vim (2019)

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Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#2
I love vim. I am not one of those users who has a huge number of plugins and takes part in an extended eco-system that they perhaps do not fully understand -- for the last ~20 years of my life I have been trying to learn a little more vim each time I use it. I often don't, but it just has so many surprises that when I feel frustrated, I try to work out the "vimmish" way of doing things. Occasionally I give into temptation and take this to extremes -- for example, writing macros that look like alphabet soup to make certain coding tasks easier. I'm never sure if this is really a good use of my time -- but I do enjoy it. I'm so grateful it exists -- it's everywhere, insanely fast, lightweight, and I've never crashed it.

Now, if there is one feature I would add to Vim, it would be "cat detection". I have a ginger cat that is irritatingly in the habit of jumping on the keyboard when he wants food.

You can only imagine how, in command mode, he effectively summons the textual equivalent of the Nine Hells of Ba'ator upon my open documents if I am not quick enough...

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#3

I love vim. I am not one of those users who has a huge number of plugins and takes part in an extended eco-system that they perhaps do not fully understand -- for the last ~20 years of my life I have been trying to learn a little more vim each time I use it. I often don't, but it just has so many surprises that when I feel frustrated, I try to work out the "vimmish" way of doing things. Occasionally I give into tempt…

> You can only imagine how, in command mode, he effectively summons the textual equivalent of the Nine Hells of Ba'ator upon my open documents if I am not quick enough...

There's always [u]ndo. Or you can use

:earlier 2m

to go back 2 minutes in time.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#4

I love vim. I am not one of those users who has a huge number of plugins and takes part in an extended eco-system that they perhaps do not fully understand -- for the last ~20 years of my life I have been trying to learn a little more vim each time I use it. I often don't, but it just has so many surprises that when I feel frustrated, I try to work out the "vimmish" way of doing things. Occasionally I give into tempt…

Any sufficiently advanced Vim macro is indistinguishable from catwords.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#5
post #3

I love vim. I am not one of those users who has a huge number of plugins and takes part in an extended eco-system that they perhaps do not fully understand -- for the last ~20 years of my life I have been trying to learn a little more vim each time I use it. I often don't, but it just has so many surprises that when I feel frustrated, I try to work out the "vimmish" way of doing things. Occasionally I give into tempt…

> You can only imagine how, in command mode, he effectively summons the textual equivalent of the Nine Hells of Ba'ator upon my open documents if I am not quick enough... There's always [u]ndo. Or you can use :earlier 2m to go back 2 minutes in time.

you always learn something old about vim every day!

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#6

I love vim. I am not one of those users who has a huge number of plugins and takes part in an extended eco-system that they perhaps do not fully understand -- for the last ~20 years of my life I have been trying to learn a little more vim each time I use it. I often don't, but it just has so many surprises that when I feel frustrated, I try to work out the "vimmish" way of doing things. Occasionally I give into tempt…

Am a similarly profiled (neo)vim user .. but without cat. Sometimes I catch strange letter combinations like "gqip" in my emails that baffle the recipients. Want vim keys everywhere!

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#7
post #3

I love vim. I am not one of those users who has a huge number of plugins and takes part in an extended eco-system that they perhaps do not fully understand -- for the last ~20 years of my life I have been trying to learn a little more vim each time I use it. I often don't, but it just has so many surprises that when I feel frustrated, I try to work out the "vimmish" way of doing things. Occasionally I give into tempt…

> You can only imagine how, in command mode, he effectively summons the textual equivalent of the Nine Hells of Ba'ator upon my open documents if I am not quick enough... There's always [u]ndo. Or you can use :earlier 2m to go back 2 minutes in time.

> to go back 2 minutes in time.

Wut.

~27 years of using vim, you just blew my mind.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#8
post #3

I love vim. I am not one of those users who has a huge number of plugins and takes part in an extended eco-system that they perhaps do not fully understand -- for the last ~20 years of my life I have been trying to learn a little more vim each time I use it. I often don't, but it just has so many surprises that when I feel frustrated, I try to work out the "vimmish" way of doing things. Occasionally I give into tempt…

> You can only imagine how, in command mode, he effectively summons the textual equivalent of the Nine Hells of Ba'ator upon my open documents if I am not quick enough... There's always [u]ndo. Or you can use :earlier 2m to go back 2 minutes in time.

me Monday morning:

:later 8h

One can dream...

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#10
post #9

If Vim was a GUI application (and could smoothly handle long lines), it would the perfect editor for me. Alas, the best I've seen so far is Neovim's discontinued GUI frontends.

Not sure I understood your point.

There are GUI versions for Windows/Linux/Mac/etc: https://www.vim.org/download.php

I use GVim (without the menu/tool bars).

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