I've never really felt comfortable in vi. I first started using it in 1989 at home, used it throughout college, and then used it on-and-off during my career, but it's never really felt powerful compared to a GUI editor. I want a scrollbar. I want a list of files in my project that I can just click on to open. I want tabs I can click. I want multiple windows that I can alt-tab to. And since I spend most of my time thi…
Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?
101–110 of 228 posts
Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?
#102I use vim for about a year or more, and I like it, however I'm still having trouble with copying and pasting tiny fragments of text. Maybe someone can help me out with this? 1) If I yank a line with yy, pressing P or p will insert the text into a new line. 2) If I go to visual mode and select a region, yank it with y, then press p/P, it gets it inserted into the current line. That is, vim preserves new lines. What I…
There's no good way to do it, unfortunatly. You need to yank the contents of the line without yanking the entire line qua line. Now, if 'l' were a text object for 'line' then there would be an obvious 'yil' for just getting the inner stuff, but since there isn't you'll have to do 0y$ to go to the start of the line and yank until the end of the line. That'll store the line contents instead of the line itself, so p wil…
1. 0y$p
and
2. op
Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arch definitely doesn't. sometimes I accidentally type vi and am confused for a few seconds why things dont work right. Luckily an alias will fix it.
Is it a case where vi is a version with the tiny feature set and vim has a larger (huge) feature set?
Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?
#104Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?
#105> The first time you stumble into vi or vim, you are shocked and disgusted that you have to use 'i' to start typing text. Can't remember which of hjkl moves in which direction. And you need to press 'a' if you want to insert after the last character of the line. Since you're already probably used to other editors, and if the arrow keys work in insert mode (they do if the system is configured properly, which is over 9…
Not that I'm a big fan of the douchey tone of the article writer, and apparently unlike this dude I find it trivial to switch between vim and Sublime Text or whatever other editor without having a crying jag, but...wait for it...vim does let you use the arrow keys. He seems to be conflating vi and vim (personally I've only used vi once or twice in the last five years). Also, his grand sweeping pronouncement that you…
But the difference is that when I need to make some edits to the code I'm writing, I immediately swap back to normal mode. It's not something you notice much if you don't use vi(m) a lot, but you go back and edit the code you're writing quite a bit.
From my experience with vim, this guy is spot on: someone who has really used vim for a long time will spend a majority of their time in normal mode, because literally you don't do anything in insert mode except write text in a linear fashion. If you want to move your cursor somewhere else, you go into normal mode to move it. If you want to erase a string you just typed, you go into normal mode. If you want to refactor your if statement into something cleaner, you go to normal mode. And the list goes on; normal mode, once you've learned it, is just so much more fluid that you will want to be in normal mode 99% of the time.
Vim can be a little crazy to use, yeah. But once you have learned it, it's unconscious. It reminds me a bit of algebra. When you first learn algebra, you're really focused on the symbolic manipulation. But as you get into the higher maths and have more experience, you'll find yourself rearranging equations without any thought. Vim is the same way, and that is what makes us vim users addicted to it: complicated text editing becomes subliminal.
Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
#107I 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 ges…
It's true. I think there is just some mind-body-editor connection that develops with vi(m) usage (and emacs, I don't know). When you really start thinking in vim, your mind starts describing what you need to do in vim commands, that magically flow out of your fingers, and vim responds.
In other editors, for any task I need to do, instead of telling my editor to do something, I have to show my editor how to do it by selecting text and menu items with the mouse, it just feels clumsy.
Once the keystrokes are muscle memory, it's impossible to beat with point and click in terms of speed.
That's just an opinion from a vim novice that can never go back.
Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?
#108> 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 failu…
Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?
#109> The first time you stumble into vi or vim, you are shocked and disgusted that you have to use 'i' to start typing text. Can't remember which of hjkl moves in which direction. And you need to press 'a' if you want to insert after the last character of the line. Since you're already probably used to other editors, and if the arrow keys work in insert mode (they do if the system is configured properly, which is over 9…
> All of this, except the 20 minutes part. I'd hate > to have to spend that much time with one of these > "enlightened" editors. Did you have this same resistance to learning when you learned the languages you are presumably programming in? "I'd hate to have to spend 20 minutes with Ruby, just let me describe my program in 'real' language please."
Speaking for myself, no. My reasons for disliking "enlightened" editors are similar to my reasons for disliking alternative keyboard layouts. If I can only be fluent in a highly specialized environment, in a sense, my skills become less portable. I like being able to walk up to someone's computer and just use it or help them with their issue. I do care about editing efficiency and superfluous keystrokes. But when I compared the keystrokes required to complete the example to what I would use in my preferred editor, (Programmer's Notepad) I didn't find the savings to be significant enough to warrant all the pain of learning a completely separate UI.
And FWIW, if I was actually doing that example in real life, I'd be in my IDE, clicking "Implement Interface", not wrangling text.
As for learning new languages, I enjoy doing it, and look forward to learning new ways of approaching problems that new languages can provide.
Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?
#110What I want to know: how good is the best autocompletion available? Does it stack up to Visual Studio's Intellisense? (For statically typed languages, that is; Intellisense doesn't work very well for eg Javascript).
I am currently evaluating PyCharm and their JavaScript and Python editors are awesome. I was mostly using vim and tmux for Django development until now. Using vim plugin in PyCharm feels really 21st century.
It kinda feels like VisualStudio + ReSharper (also a JetBrains product) for .NET