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History and effective use of Vim (2019)

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Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#71
post #26

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.

Not only in the US south. In Germany, there is a health insurance called "Kaufmännische Krankenkasse", and when I first saw their name abbreviated, I wondered why it was written KKH for about half a second...

KKH = Kaufmännische Krankenkasse Hauptverwaltung

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#72
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 can do something very similar with nano.

If you have `set backupdir` enabled, any and all savepoints on a file are backed up with timestamps and a revision number.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#73
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.

It's ok, just tap C-X C-B C-S C-T C-C, which is the standard keybinding for rescinding the soul binding contract request procedure.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#74
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!

If you want Vim keys everywhere… A friend of mine I met through my own similar (free) library is developing this like a madman: https://kindavim.app It costs $3/month (coffee) but for a Vim person like me I gladly pay. Making this work across macOS is a total mess and a full-time job, and it's not trivial work. If you want a free version, I have https://github.com/dbalatero/VimMode.spoon as a Hammerspoon plugin that…

Dang that’s cool, I used tridactyl a bit in web browsers and it just got too messy in a browser (in addition to the new key bindings). In theory I support this endeavor but one of my biggest annoyances is when applications “overwrite” default/expected keybindings (looking at you excel web app). It seems to me a large part of web accessibility is being able to navigate a computer without even a mouse (hey that’s what vim does) but I really wish there was full OS support for this (seems to be the goal for kindaVim?) opposed to a “layer”. Certainly best of luck and cheers to the development efforts - have taken note

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#75
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.

It’s funny to read about this because I’m sure many people have this same internal thought process when using vim

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#76
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!

If you want Vim keys everywhere… A friend of mine I met through my own similar (free) library is developing this like a madman: https://kindavim.app It costs $3/month (coffee) but for a Vim person like me I gladly pay. Making this work across macOS is a total mess and a full-time job, and it's not trivial work. If you want a free version, I have https://github.com/dbalatero/VimMode.spoon as a Hammerspoon plugin that…

I can also recommend sketchyVim as I think it just uses your normal .vimrc file for its configuration and it’s FOSS.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#77

I’ve used vim for decades and have utterly failed at switching away every time I tried to. I miss everything about it too much. My only real complaint is I have a hard time using IDEs, because my vim muscle memory is too strong and despite many offering vim key bindings they never offer all the features/keys I typically use. Often missing are recording/playback, visual mode, anchors, vim’s (unique) regex syntax, buff…

Many IDE's have a VIM editor plugin, so you can have the best of both worlds :)

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#78

I’ve used vim for decades and have utterly failed at switching away every time I tried to. I miss everything about it too much. My only real complaint is I have a hard time using IDEs, because my vim muscle memory is too strong and despite many offering vim key bindings they never offer all the features/keys I typically use. Often missing are recording/playback, visual mode, anchors, vim’s (unique) regex syntax, buff…

Many IDE's have a VIM editor plugin, so you can have the best of both worlds :)

>> despite many offering vim key bindings they never offer all the features/keys I typically use

he seems to have tried that and it didn’t work out, more likely to happen for advanced or power user.

Edit: typo

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#79
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for further clarification. I haven't needed such capability in a text editor, but probably I should look into what that provides. And I don't see how such features are necessary to rule GVim as GUI. I have a fairly basic classification: TUI runs in a terminal, GUI have their own windows.

GVim is a GUI in the same way that a terminal app is technically a GUI. It is surrounded by GUI chrome and has menus and such, but you are working with unstyled plaintext as you would in any other terminal window. Put this another way, you can tell the difference between something like vim and Emacs versus Kate and Microsoft Word. It is not necessary to get into the minutia of what makes all these text editors differ…

Think what you're asking for is a vim interface built around arbitrary mouse usage and discovery, the latter being of utmost emphasis I presume. And yeah, it's a valid complaint that vim GUI implementers seem incapable of getting to that level and just put chrome around what is essentially a TUI instance.

Lack of mouse-led discovery likely also contributes to vim veterans being surprised that vim has this or that feature. TUI-orientation is quite tenuous when it comes to discovery of behavior. The whichkey family of plugins[0][1] is an interesting experiment in combatting this, but does nothing for the large case of commands that aren't mapped to a key by default, like the example of the 'earlier' command mentioned higher in this thread.

[0]https://github.com/folke/which-key.nvim

[1]https://github.com/liuchengxu/vim-which-key

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#80

I’ve used vim for decades and have utterly failed at switching away every time I tried to. I miss everything about it too much. My only real complaint is I have a hard time using IDEs, because my vim muscle memory is too strong and despite many offering vim key bindings they never offer all the features/keys I typically use. Often missing are recording/playback, visual mode, anchors, vim’s (unique) regex syntax, buff…

Many IDE's have a VIM editor plugin, so you can have the best of both worlds :)

In my experience it's rarely the best of both worlds, it's more of a case where the IDE becomes more tolerable.

The problem comes in when the IDE struggles to keep up, or is busy trying to move my cursor somewhere that I don't want it to be.

IntelliJ is really bad about this, I'll often type something and hit esc to go back to normal mode. Mentally I'm moving to another line using a Vim motion, but IntelliJ lags, and eventually moves the cursor to some problem it thinks I need to solve right now (and I might or might not be back in insert mode).

It's frustrating, but probably less frustrating than not using the Vim bindings. Maybe it's something with the Vim plugin, or something I've done. It's more of a minor headache as opposed to a migraine.

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