Just go through the vim tutorial and use a vim extension for your favorite editor
Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?
71–80 of 84 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, you're going to be programming for the rest of your life, right? I put a bunch of time into customizing vim... god, I think it was 15 years ago? Whenever this comes up, people make it sound like you are somehow going to be doing that every single day for the rest of your life or something... and then, awkwardly, I tend to see them screwing around constantly with some new IDE-of-the-week that crashes constantl…
There's churn in the Vim world too. Plugins and plugin managers change. For example, with Neovim, Packer and Mason are apparently what's good to use now, and Mason literally came out 3 months ago. I guess if you don't use many plugins (and aren't trying to make Vim a full fledged IDE) then it's fine, but if you are, there's a lot of churn to go through.
What I've found over the last 2 jobs/3 laptops is that I'm quite comfortable starting working and being productive with vi, and then over time I start setting 'nocompatible' when I need some feature from Vim, and then some weeks in add a vimrc/init.vim.
Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?
#73Why? No, seriously, why do you think you have to switch if you are productive with VSCode? I used to be all in with Vim and then Emacs many years ago. I can manage pretty well with both to this day. But I moved onto VSCode a few years ago and… it’s very nice. It just works out of the box. I have tried to move back to Emacs for example, but the lack of trivial and good remoting features and the lack of great LSP integ…
I remember I found setting up remote connections for VSCode harder than emacs.
isnt emacs just M-x ssh … and ure done?
Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?
#74I'm not sure why you'd want this, what specific amazing things do you see people do in vi?
I have too many years experience using vi, but probably still only use 30% of the features. And for example it's really not designed to be an IDE, even though, with splits, and combined with tmux, you can make a pretty good IDE out of it. One problem I find is that mis-keying can really blow up; I'm often using u or ctrl-o or to undo or get back to where I accidentally navigated to by tapping the wrong key, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?
#75I found this game very helpful for solidifying my vim skills, and I would highly recommend it! https://vim-adventures.com/ It helped me to be a better vimmer, and it was fun too!
This is great!
I'm terrible at it.
But, this is great!
Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, you're going to be programming for the rest of your life, right? I put a bunch of time into customizing vim... god, I think it was 15 years ago? Whenever this comes up, people make it sound like you are somehow going to be doing that every single day for the rest of your life or something... and then, awkwardly, I tend to see them screwing around constantly with some new IDE-of-the-week that crashes constantl…
There's churn in the Vim world too. Plugins and plugin managers change. For example, with Neovim, Packer and Mason are apparently what's good to use now, and Mason literally came out 3 months ago. I guess if you don't use many plugins (and aren't trying to make Vim a full fledged IDE) then it's fine, but if you are, there's a lot of churn to go through.
There's approximately zero churn in Emacs. Moved up four major versions a few years ago and I think I had to regigger one line in my config, out of a config of over 2000 lines.
Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?
#77A couple of suggestions (in no particular order, and from an ex-Emacs/Xcode/Jetbrains/VSCode and current nvim user): 1. Don't. There's no need to 'switch'. There are marvellously 'productive' developers using every editor under the sun, and neither the quality nor quantity of their work is strongly related to their choice of editor. There are world-class developers who do everything in a vanilla Sublime Text. Others…
Why did you switch to nvim from emacs?
Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The well known “Vim mode paradox”: if you like the Vim mode provided by another editor, it means you don’t know Vim well enough to justify using Vim nor Vim mode. Vim modes don’t approach even 10% of the Vim features you need to reach the bare minimum of efficient editing.
> Vim modes don’t approach even 10% of the Vim features you need to reach the bare minimum of efficient editing. What's the 90% that's not available in VSCode with the Vim extension?
Trying it out again now, this isn't Vim, it's an entirely different product. It doesn't have command editing mode q: nor q/. It doesn't use Vim's regexes and doesn't support \v (which is probably good, Vim's regexes are very bad, but it's still not Vim). There is limited support for windowing, I mean not really support at all, because this is a better windowing system that Vim (:h CTRL-W_J). Although I am surprised `ctrl-w +` works. Of course no support for Vim plugins like surround.vim. Vim out of the box is not a usable editor. H and L seem to be busted and scroll the screen.
Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?
#79A couple of suggestions (in no particular order, and from an ex-Emacs/Xcode/Jetbrains/VSCode and current nvim user): 1. Don't. There's no need to 'switch'. There are marvellously 'productive' developers using every editor under the sun, and neither the quality nor quantity of their work is strongly related to their choice of editor. There are world-class developers who do everything in a vanilla Sublime Text. Others…
Why did you switch to nvim from emacs?
Well I don't use the 'switch' term - cliches cloud thought, and I've only at some points in my programming life used a single editor for everything, and for me it's been more a pragmatic journey than anxious 'switch'. Also I don't always work as a programmer - so sometimes, returning to the field after a few years away, I start afresh with new tools.
I did once use emacs extensively. I stopped because at the time I moved almost exclusively into iOS work, which mostly meant XCode. I disliked that enough that I tried and enjoyed the only real alternative - Jetbrains' AppCode. So then when I moved on again to non-iOS work I had fallen for the Jetbrains approach, so mostly used IntelliJ. I did have one small spell again with emacs, when writing some clojure (for which it's a good fit), but found it overwrought for my more recent taste.
But all this time I had used vim for small on-off and in-terminal edits, and mostly used vim keybinds in other editors. Anyway, via a couple more shifts (including using VSCode for a while), the advent of LSP and treesitter really makes neovim close enough to matching IntelliJ's features for my purposes. I just like neovim and its ecosystem, and it works well enough for me. But so would emacs or IntelliJ or VSCode or vim or emacs. I probably make several choices a week far more significant than what text editor to use.
Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?
#80build your existing workflow from vscode in emacs or vim. do not adapt to it, adapt it to your current sota experience. this will take some effort, but it will pass, and be worth it.
nothing wrong with gui apps on macos/windows, but a terminal+browser setup on linux can be amazing.