Live data from Hacker News

History and effective use of Vim (2019)

begriffs.com

31–40 of 98 posts

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#31
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.

Okay I might need to start using vim!

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#32
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

This is me all the time. The worst is “kkk”. I can’t remember why I type it in vim (it’s muscle memory, and I’m not at a computer to try it out), but it has really bad connotations here in the US south, so… no bueno.

In Brazil is just a laugh.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#33
post #15
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.

What's wrong with the way it handles long lines? It can either wrap or not wrap depending on your configuration. Personally, I disable wrapping in every editor I use because I find it extremely off putting. I'm curious which behavior you desire and if you have any examples of editors that you think handle long lines well.

Another issue is scrolling visual lines one by one that have been wrapped. (N)vim can only scroll by literal lines, so if a line is longer than the screen and wrapped, there is no way to step through line by visual line.

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/8715

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#35
post #24
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a TUI. I would like Vim to be able to e.g. draw a normal line instead of changing the background of a column of characters, when cc is set. Also not needing to patch fonts to get things like powerline. That and other things of this nature.

Again, I don't understand your point. GVim is GUI, not TUI.

A GUI can draw vector graphics, like lines, arcs, arrows etc. GVim still behaves like a terminal, which just has a grid of characters to work with. Any such vector graphics is done awkwardly with fonts, which doesn't give the best result, and patching fonts is not the best UX.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#36
post #33
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the way it handles long lines? It can either wrap or not wrap depending on your configuration. Personally, I disable wrapping in every editor I use because I find it extremely off putting. I'm curious which behavior you desire and if you have any examples of editors that you think handle long lines well.

Another issue is scrolling visual lines one by one that have been wrapped. (N)vim can only scroll by literal lines, so if a line is longer than the screen and wrapped, there is no way to step through line by visual line. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/8715

That’s strange. I just tested it and both GVim on windows and vim on a vps linux terminal have no problem with going anywhere on a 170k long line. It lags a little but visually is fine.

And just in case you missed it, you may gj gk to navigate visual lines or remap j, k (and , ) to gj gk to make that default.

I have a genuine question why use nvim at all if it has such issues with presenting text in a window.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#37
post #27

Just asked my Emacs to open the link, read it and summarize it out loud for me with emacspeak.

Just opened Emacs in evil mode, and asked it to summarize the report back to front. Noticed a cloud of black smoke in the room and emacs asking me something about trading my soul for improved keybindings.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#38
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 save some typing, seems :ea is an alias for it, unless you got more commands starting with ea.

I normally use u (undo) though.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is me all the time. The worst is “kkk”. I can’t remember why I type it in vim (it’s muscle memory, and I’m not at a computer to try it out), but it has really bad connotations here in the US south, so… no bueno.

Unsolicited advice for scrolling without spamming j and k: - C-u and C-d to jump up/down - [ and ] to go prev/next empty line (I have a macro to clear empty spaces at the end of lines so this works well for jumping functions in code) - from the article: 50% to go the halfway point of a document - 100gg to go to line 100 - 100k to go 100 lines down Are there any more good ones? Edit: occurs to me that you might have r…

> Are there any more good ones?

I find these handy, especially after doing a search (quoted from :h z):

- z. redraw, cursor line to center of window

- z redraw, cursor line to top of window

- z- redraw, cursor line at bottom of window

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#40
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.

When your are working with huge files or files with huge lines it makes sense to disable syntax highlighting to improve performance (:syntax off).
Post reply on HN