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Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

viemu.com

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

#121

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

skrebbel wrote: post #58
skrebbel wrote: post #52

> 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…

Oh! I read over the line that says that the author is actually developing a Visual Studio plugin to close exactly this gap. That's cool. Also puts what I took for condescension in a different light. Anyone used it? I might consider learning vi bindings decently if I can keep getting all the IDE goodness.

I've tried his free trial for ms word and it was pretty good.

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

#122

Post by techiferous »

TomasSedovic wrote: post #7
techiferous wrote: post #4

I want to meet a dvorak keyboard user who is passionate about vi.

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?

Hi TomasSedovic!

> Anything in particular you want to ask?

Just wondering how much dvorak gets in the way of vi/vim. Lots of wonderful answers showed up in this thread! Looks like dvorak is a small obstacle (because of hjkl) but not a show-stopper.

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

#123

Post by Florin_Andrei »

drblast wrote: 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 learned the bare minimum required to use vi. Insert, find, override-save... That's pretty much it. When vi is the only option, it's good enough; otherwise I'm free to use different editors.

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

#124

Post by wahnfrieden »

andrewvc wrote: post #75
drblast wrote: 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.

Maybe you didn't use Vim with much depth? I know plenty of people who claim to use it but just stay in insert-mode all the time, don't use text-objects, etc. It doesn't really count if you actively avoid most things that make vim unique.

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

#125

Post by mmavnn »

nik_0_0 wrote: post #35

Interesting article, I have always been interesting in moving to Vim, and this article all but sealed the deal for me. The only problem being I don't really see how useful this would be for general notepad usage. I understand the author of this article is selling his plugin for Visual Studio, and this is a marvellous way to do it. Is there any other way to integrate vim with Visual Studio 2008 without purchasing his…

Try VsVim if you're on VS2010.

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

#126

Post by wahnfrieden »

dchest wrote: post #21

I 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…

Put this into your vimrc to make lines behave like they're a text-object. Then to yank a line without the carraige-return, it's just yil or yal (yank in/a line)

vnoremap al :norm!0v$h vnoremap il :norm!^vg_ onoremap al :norm val onoremap il :norm vil

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

#127

Post by chc »

warp wrote: post #113
burke wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who used emacs for five years before switching to vim, my personal experience was that the top-level comment is more true than this one.

As someone who used emacs for 8 years, then swiched to vim and used that for 4 years, and then switched back to emacs 2 years ago -- my personal experience is that being forced to use anything which isn't vim or emacs will give me fits and make me cry, but switching from one to the other is mostly fine.

As someone who always used graphical text editors with discoverable interfaces, for a long time I found both vi and emacs to be like black boxes covered in unlabeled fiddly knobs — except turning vi's knobs in the wrong order would make some of the other knobs start spinning wildly. Just trying to get either of them to use a color scheme that didn't hurt my eyes was an exercise in frustration. I can use either passably nowadays and do use both fairly frequently, but I have to admit I still find don't find either particularly nice to use. I feel like whatever is great about them is always hidden somewhere just out of sight.

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

#128

Post by Domenic_S »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #123
drblast wrote: 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 learned the bare minimum required to use vi. Insert, find, override-save... That's pretty much it. When vi is the only option, it's good enough; otherwise I'm free to use different editors.

Funny that you got downvoted. The entire industry has spent the last... forever years making things easier to use/gui-fied, and you get dinged for wanting to use those improvements.

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

#129

Post by blinks »

natesm wrote: post #97
artursapek wrote: post #91

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.

Does http://www.corsofamily.net/jcorso/vi/ not work for you?

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

#130

Post by javajosh »

I'm realizing that the distinction between vim/emacs and typical IDE editors is entropy. Vim is extraordinarily precise - very low entropy at all times. An IDE editor is constantly moving between high entropy (e.g. mouse motion) and low entropy (e.g. the interpretation of the mouse motion as a precise command). This implies that vim appeals to minds that desire constant precision, and GUI editors appeal to minds that prefer to vacillate between levels of precision.

Decoupled from this is the question of which pattern of thought lends itself to being a better programmer. There is a good argument either way: staying at a very precise level of thought is wonderful when solving problems; and yet it is better to loosen up when figuring out which problems to solve.

I tend to take the view that a programmer's actions while programming should ideally be unambiguous, precise, and regular at all times. Higher level thought should have a distinct place, time and another set of tools (pencil and paper being foremost among the alternatives).

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