Live data from Hacker News

Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

viemu.com

91–100 of 228 posts

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#91
post #19

Don't ever start using vi. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have vi key bindings will give you fits and make you cry. Learning vi is your standard process of enlightenment and elation followed by a lifetime of disappointment. Think about how you'd feel if you ate the best meal of your life at age 13, and the restaurant where you ate it went out of business the next day. You'll be…

But why do you stop using it in your scenario? Why does the restaurant have to go out of business?

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#92
post #88
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very nice to have a tab for each of your files. Until you have twenty files open and you can't find the right one (will happen sooner than you think, at least on largeish projects).

Yes, this. About a year ago, I finally bothered to understand the buffer concept in vim (after a brief stint in emacs), and suddenly any tabbed editor felt clumsy.

I use VS2010 every day and the tabbed interface drives me nuts. I wish it was more conceptually like Emacs.

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pleasure to meet you. Not sure how much passion you require. I'm not exactly head-over-heels with vim, but I have been using it for about 7 years and dvorak for about 3. Anything in particular you want to ask?

I imagine the mnemonics make it work reasonably well, but what about hjkl? Do you really get used to having those spread around?

I remapped hjkl to htns (the keys directly under the right fingers on the home row) and it works wonderfully. 'n' then needs to be remapped, so I have 'N' set to 'j' and 'n' set to 'k' so that the two commands for repeating a search forward or backward are adjacent keys on the Dvorak keyboard.

No other changes required. I don't use vim's 't' or 's' commands, so no problem there.

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#94
post #19

Don't ever start using vi. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have vi key bindings will give you fits and make you cry. Learning vi is your standard process of enlightenment and elation followed by a lifetime of disappointment. Think about how you'd feel if you ate the best meal of your life at age 13, and the restaurant where you ate it went out of business the next day. You'll be…

I just switched from ViM to emacs (mostly for SLIME) after about 6 years of ViM usage, it wasn't a big deal at all, both are great.

I use TextMate day to day. If I'm not on OS X I use Emacs for making software, and sometimes I use Emacs on OS X. It's great for JavaScript.

Though vim is no longer my main editor I still use it every day. Right tool for the job and all that.

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#95

> Do whatever you want. Don't learn it if you feel it's too much effort just for nothing. Learn emacs instead. Or stay in your IDE using a lousy editor. Whatever. Why do all articles about how wonderful vi is end with condescension? Anyway: vi -> fast editing. IDE -> fast maintenance. I know which one I'd choose. The text editing features of an IDE is not why people choose to use IDEs (note: of course this helps best…

"Why do all articles about how wonderful vi is end with condescension?"

Because one way to get someone over the initial learning hump is to "encourage" them by challenging their manhood. Same principle behind a boot camp sergeant telling every single incoming group that they are the worst bunch of nambypamby girliemen he's ever seen and he's been in this army for 25 years and that he will consider it a personal failure if he doesn't cause each and every one of you to quit in a crying mess. You're supposed to be motivated to try your best in the hope that he'll begrudgingly concede at the end that you didn't suck after all.

It works, but it has the side effect of creating a strong tribal identity among those who pass the bar, an "us" who are good enough to make it and the "them" who didn't. The military deliberately exploits this side effect; I'm less convinced it's a good idea in a programmer context.

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#96
post #19

Don't ever start using vi. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have vi key bindings will give you fits and make you cry. Learning vi is your standard process of enlightenment and elation followed by a lifetime of disappointment. Think about how you'd feel if you ate the best meal of your life at age 13, and the restaurant where you ate it went out of business the next day. You'll be…

Don't ever start using emacs. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have emacs key bindings will give you fits and make you cry. Learning emacs is your standard process of enlightenment and elation followed by a lifetime of disappointment. Think about how you'd feel if you ate the best meal of your life at age 13, and the restaurant where you ate it went out of business the next day. Y…

Hehehe, yes I keep opening printer dialogs and new windows in my browser because of this. Though to be fair, that's often more due to being on Windows and not having 'focus follows mouse'.

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#97
post #19

Don't ever start using vi. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have vi key bindings will give you fits and make you cry. Learning vi is your standard process of enlightenment and elation followed by a lifetime of disappointment. Think about how you'd feel if you ate the best meal of your life at age 13, and the restaurant where you ate it went out of business the next day. You'll be…

But why do you stop using it in your scenario? Why does the restaurant have to go out of business?

Well, I use Xcode because the performance loss in writing Objective-C without autocompletion is larger than the performance gain from using vim. However, navigation is just so painful, and "awful" is really being kind about Xcode's find/replace.

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#98
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a case where vi is a version with the tiny feature set and vim has a larger (huge) feature set?

Sounds reasonable. I was about to guess a similar thing. A minimal Debian install (perhaps Ubuntu and other child-distros as well?) installs a vim-tiny[1], which often throws people off[2]. [1] http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/vim-tiny [2] http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

But Debian, etc. updates /usr/bin/vi to point to the Vim with the most features.

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#99
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do you stop using it in your scenario? Why does the restaurant have to go out of business?

Well, I use Xcode because the performance loss in writing Objective-C without autocompletion is larger than the performance gain from using vim. However, navigation is just so painful , and "awful" is really being kind about Xcode's find/replace.

Is there no suitable vim autocomplete script for Objective-C?

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#100
I really don't get how its more efficient than a modern editor!

I use vi(m?) when I am working on a unix/linux/mac terminal and have done so for 10+ years. But I never bothered learning it properly so I only know a handful or two of commands. So I can't appreciate both perspectives clearly.

However, how can it be faster and more efficient to edit in vi than in a modern editor? I'd assume that if you can use multi gesture scrolling, point and click location, the modern editor type keyboard shortcuts (with multiple keys pressed) that it would lend itself to be faster to work with and more "efficient" somehow (hard to explain).

Would love to know what vi-people think about that because I am most likely wrong (as I said, very one-sided experience) but would love to get that level of detail (I don't think the story was iron clad on that point).

Is there anyone who has switched from many years of very happy vi onto modern editors and love that more?

Thanks..

Post reply on HN