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Why I use vim

michaeltrier.com

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Re: Why I use vim

#21

Post by drhowarddrfine »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #14

I used to use Vim, and then I got a job after college working with .NET (this was in 2003). Since then I've used Visual Studio as my primary IDE. Its features (or that of Eclipse) seem to (pardon the pun) eclipse the crap out of Vim. The contextual information you get in VS by hovering your mouse on any variable, the built-in debugging, etc. Studio isn't a just text editor, it actually understands the semantics of yo…

You need all that to figure out the 20K+ functions/libraries/system calls to get anything to work. If you need all that, use emacs.

Re: Why I use vim

#22

Post by Roboprog »

rodh257 wrote: post #20
noveltyaccount wrote: post #14

I used to use Vim, and then I got a job after college working with .NET (this was in 2003). Since then I've used Visual Studio as my primary IDE. Its features (or that of Eclipse) seem to (pardon the pun) eclipse the crap out of Vim. The contextual information you get in VS by hovering your mouse on any variable, the built-in debugging, etc. Studio isn't a just text editor, it actually understands the semantics of yo…

You can get VsVim to use vim like editing inside of Visual Studio, which may give you the best of both worlds?

For Java, NetBeans + vim plugin does just that. Major win. Same editor (almost, plain old vi) in impoverished production environments, full vim under cygwin for quick patches, and the same keystrokes in my IDE with all the other goodies for long term projects.

Re: Why I use vim

#23

Post by re_todd »

rickyc091 wrote: post #5
pacomerh wrote: post #2

The speed increase on paragraph editing capabilities is really attracting versus pointing your mouse to do everything. I'm gonna give it a shot, thanks.

It took me two weeks before I finally grew comfortable with vim, so don't get discouraged. Start off by treating it as a regular text editor. Use the arrow keys to move around, use control (windows) or option (mac) + arrow keys to quickly move between words, etc. Slowly introduce a few vim shortcuts at a time. It was also helpful for me to write the commands on a whiteboard or a post it and have it on my monitor as r…

Yeah, having them written down off to the side helped me finally learn vim. There are many vim cheat sheets out there via a quick google that I wish I would have used starting out.

Re: Why I use vim

#24

Post by mattmiller »

I am stuck with windows and cygwin. Is there a way to run vim without the weird bugs? I run rxvt and still see a lot of weirdness with vim, I really only use it for quick edits. I would love to put in the time to learn it better, but I don't want to suffer through weirdness on top of the learning curve.

Re: Why I use vim

#25

Post by notJim »

wyclif wrote: post #4

This is helpful, particularly the resources listed, but I would advise against using someone else's config starting out. Continually editing my own .vimrc for the first few months was a big part of learning. If you use someone else's dotfiles right from the start, there's a good chance you'll end up believing some behaviour is default when it really isn't, and that's going to mess you up.

I agree with this very strongly. The first time I tried to learn VIM, I installed janus [1], and ended up with this monstrous, complicated system with a million plugins that I didn't understand. The mouse sort of worked, but not the way I expected it to.

I'm now sort-of trying to learn VIM again. My vimrc has about 10-15 lines in it, and I know what each one does. I have a color scheme installed, but no other plugins.

How I boosted my Vim [2] has been helpful to me in adding things to my vimrc, because Vincent Driessen is, as always, clear-minded and erudite in his description of what things do, and has good taste on a basic setup that will make sense to the modern developer. Again though, I haven't blindly pasted in all his stuff—instead, when I feel some friction with my Vim settings, I head to that article and see if there's a tweak he's listed that I can use.

[1]: https://github.com/carlhuda/janus

[2]: http://nvie.com/posts/how-i-boosted-my-vim/

Re: Why I use vim

#26

Post by anykey »

mattmiller wrote: post #24

I am stuck with windows and cygwin. Is there a way to run vim without the weird bugs? I run rxvt and still see a lot of weirdness with vim, I really only use it for quick edits. I would love to put in the time to learn it better, but I don't want to suffer through weirdness on top of the learning curve.

gVim runs just fine on windows, although I cannot speak for the terminal equivalent.

Re: Why I use vim

#27

Post by MatthewPhillips »

anykey wrote: post #26
mattmiller wrote: post #24

I am stuck with windows and cygwin. Is there a way to run vim without the weird bugs? I run rxvt and still see a lot of weirdness with vim, I really only use it for quick edits. I would love to put in the time to learn it better, but I don't want to suffer through weirdness on top of the learning curve.

gVim runs just fine on windows, although I cannot speak for the terminal equivalent.

Works the same as on UNIX. No need for cygwin.

Re: Why I use vim

#28

Post by anykey »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #14

I used to use Vim, and then I got a job after college working with .NET (this was in 2003). Since then I've used Visual Studio as my primary IDE. Its features (or that of Eclipse) seem to (pardon the pun) eclipse the crap out of Vim. The contextual information you get in VS by hovering your mouse on any variable, the built-in debugging, etc. Studio isn't a just text editor, it actually understands the semantics of yo…

And that is why VisualStudio is considered an IDE rather than an editor. As with the rest of the *nix toolkit, the philosophy with Vi(m) is to do one simple thing (editing) and do it really really well, for better or worse.

I think this exemplifies this: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/tips.html#shell-window

Re: Why I use vim

#29

Post by Karunamon »

So has anyone ever been a die-hard vim user, been absolutely seduced by Emacs and the wealth of things that go with it (IRC? Org mode? Holy crap!), tried to use it, and been completely turned off by the abundance of control keys?

This describes me. I really, really want to like Emacs and learn to use it, but coming from vim, such heavy use of the meta keys just feels wrong.

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