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VsVim

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Re: VsVim

#31

Post by tikhonj »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #28
greyfade wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still having trouble seeing the value of an IDE. When programming, all I'm doing is editing text and occasionally running an external program. what does an IDE have that makes it so valuable? (Honest question! I've used IDEs in the past - MSVC, Eclipse, NetBeans, Anjuta, Code::Blocks, and several others - and found that the generally poor editors made it more difficult to program.)

For one, they provide a way to stay immersed in all aspects of your project continually while switching around between tasks (seeing your files/class tree + code + warnings/errors + status simultaneously on one screen). Even if you're savvy enough to achieve some of this through a careful terminal splitting/tiling setup, you're just halfway-implementing a graphical interface. Like most GUIs, you're also provided with…

Emacs also lets you stay immersed in all aspects of your project at once. However, unlike a GUI, using different panes in Emacs is uniform: the commands you use to get around the file/tree view are the same commands you use to get around your code are the same commands you use to get around your compiler output.

Emacs also provides some really nice technology for finding commands including ido-mode and C-h m (which lists commands for the current mode and is incredibly useful). However, here the real magic is that getting around a help buffer is again the same as navigating code--you can use the same command to search and the same commands to move around.

Emacs also has a nice system for integrating arbitrary output from an external process into your code, letting you have error highlighting and static analysis for arbitrary languages. On top of this, it has several really nice modes like js-2 and SLIME that create an even more compelling experience for certain languages.

On top of this, Emacs has a bunch of really nice features like TRAMP which lets you visit arbitrary remote files and even open remote shells trivially. On top of this, it is much easier to extend than any IDE or even any other editor I have ever seen.

So really, Emacs can provide everything you want, it can provide it in a much more consistent UI and it is infinitely configurable.

Re: VsVim

#32

Post by greyfade »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #28
greyfade wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still having trouble seeing the value of an IDE. When programming, all I'm doing is editing text and occasionally running an external program. what does an IDE have that makes it so valuable? (Honest question! I've used IDEs in the past - MSVC, Eclipse, NetBeans, Anjuta, Code::Blocks, and several others - and found that the generally poor editors made it more difficult to program.)

For one, they provide a way to stay immersed in all aspects of your project continually while switching around between tasks (seeing your files/class tree + code + warnings/errors + status simultaneously on one screen). Even if you're savvy enough to achieve some of this through a careful terminal splitting/tiling setup, you're just halfway-implementing a graphical interface. Like most GUIs, you're also provided with…

Well, with the exception of a class tree (which I've had trouble using in the past), those are all the reasons I just use a text editor. So, I guess I still don't understand.

You see, I have file/project trees, warning/error buffers, build status and shells (among other things) in Vim and Emacs with keyboard-driven access to all the tools I use, without having to hunt through a twisty passage of menus, all alike.

Even static analysis and error highlighting is available (even for C++ with vim-clang-complete, for example).

So I guess what I don't understand is why there is a need for all of this to be "integrated" in a WIMP-style GUI.

Re: VsVim

#33

Post by palish »

Stasyan wrote: post #16

I use this plugin everyday. It's got some serious bugs that make my heart stop. The biggest one is Undo. Looks like the plugin keeps it's own list of modifications that were performed. So when sometimes I press "u" to undo the latest change - Visual Studio gets suspended for a minute or two, and all my changes that I did since I opened Visual Studio (could be a day or a week) are pretty much gone. The work around is…

That is absolutely horrible. There's no reason to subject yourself to that. Use this instead: http://www.viemu.com/

I've been a happy ViEmu customer for... Hmm... Three years? Maybe a little longer. Anyway, it's just perfect.

Re: VsVim

#34

Post by halter73 »

diab0lic wrote: post #21
Stasyan wrote: post #16

I use this plugin everyday. It's got some serious bugs that make my heart stop. The biggest one is Undo. Looks like the plugin keeps it's own list of modifications that were performed. So when sometimes I press "u" to undo the latest change - Visual Studio gets suspended for a minute or two, and all my changes that I did since I opened Visual Studio (could be a day or a week) are pretty much gone. The work around is…

Hopefully stuff like this will get fixed now that the project is accepting contributions from other developers. There was a point where his employment agreement prevented such from happening.

It's great to hear that VsVim is finally accepting contributions from outside of Microsoft.

During my internship at Microsoft last summer, there was one day where the interns in STB got into groups of about 5 and presented on topics of strategic importance to Microsoft. My group presented on how Microsoft could better embrace open source, and during my part of the presentation I focused heavily on how many of Microsoft's "OSS" projects don't accept outside contributions.

I used VsVim to showcase how Microsoft was doing open source wrong. It was a great example, because Jared Parsons seemed to be doing everything he could to be a good OSS citizen and reach out to those who typically use an OSS stack (by putting his project on github instead of codeplex for example), but he had to turn down contributors outside of Microsoft as a matter of policy. I also didn't suspect that Microsoft would be repurposing a Vim emulator plugin written in F# for any of its closed source projects, so it didn't make sense to stop outsiders from contributing out of fear of losing complete ownership of the codebase.

Several high-level execs in STB including Satya Nadella were there, so I would like to believe that my presentation played some small part in Microsoft now allowing outside contributions to VsVim. A discussion of VsVim's contribution policy ate up a lot of the question and answer session after my group's presentation, so it was pretty clear that I wasn't the only there who thought it was messed up.

Re: VsVim

#35

Post by jaredpar »

Stasyan wrote: post #16

I use this plugin everyday. It's got some serious bugs that make my heart stop. The biggest one is Undo. Looks like the plugin keeps it's own list of modifications that were performed. So when sometimes I press "u" to undo the latest change - Visual Studio gets suspended for a minute or two, and all my changes that I did since I opened Visual Studio (could be a day or a week) are pretty much gone. The work around is…

What version of VsVim are you using? There was a bug with this exact behavior in 1.1 (and possibly 1.1.1). I got it fixed for the 1.2 release which is the current version in the Visual Studio gallery.

Bug Details: https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/issues/672

Re: VsVim

#36

Post by palish »

jta wrote: post #12

Anyone tried this and can give some insight in comparison with ViEmu from http://www.viemu.com/ ?

Yes. I have been a happy ViEmu customer for three or four years now. It's basically perfect. Integrates with Visual Assist, too. Very worth the $99.

Re: VsVim

#37

Post by jaredpar »

bmj wrote: post #13
jta wrote: post #12

Anyone tried this and can give some insight in comparison with ViEmu from http://www.viemu.com/ ?

I use this daily in VS2010, and have used ViEmu in previous VS versions. Generally, I like it, but it can be a bit sluggish at times. The only plugin I have running is JSLint, so I suspect it's VSVim causing the problems (though it only generally bogs down when I leave VS2010 for a bit). The keybindings work as one would expect. As I mentioned in a different thread, I wish it could break out of the tabbed window conv…

What version are you using? Prior to 1.2 there was a nasty perf bug with :hlsearch that caused it to be sluggish with 1) very large files or 2) a good number of files opened. The bug is mostly fixed in 1.2 but there are still a couple of corner cases. Those are addressed in 1.3 which will be released sometime next week. A beta drop is available here

https://github.com/downloads/jaredpar/VsVim/VsVim-1.2-Beta2....

As for crashes I'd love to hear about any you found. Feel free to send me email (hacker news alias at microsoft.com) or post an issue on github.

https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/issues

Re: VsVim

#38

Post by [deleted] »

halter73 wrote: post #34
diab0lic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully stuff like this will get fixed now that the project is accepting contributions from other developers. There was a point where his employment agreement prevented such from happening.

It's great to hear that VsVim is finally accepting contributions from outside of Microsoft. During my internship at Microsoft last summer, there was one day where the interns in STB got into groups of about 5 and presented on topics of strategic importance to Microsoft. My group presented on how Microsoft could better embrace open source, and during my part of the presentation I focused heavily on how many of Microso…

[deleted]

Re: VsVim

#39

Post by SkyMarshal »

johnfn wrote: post #4

This seems to be a part of a nascent trend in IDEs. There's vrapper and eclim for eclipse, Vintage for Sublime Text, and now this as well. I've seen a lot of arguments about how people don't use IDEs because vim/emacs are better, and I always felt they were misguided. I see the feature sets of vim/emacs and your common IDE as nearly disjoint sets, and I couldn't be happier to see the good parts of the two editors bei…

Even better, there are vim keybinding plugins for just about everything - Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Opera (if it's updated now, not sure). Even Emacs (vimpulse). Combined with IDE plugins like eclim you can set up a single unified key interface to almost everything you do on a computer.

Re: VsVim

#40

Post by jaredpar »

tkellogg wrote: post #23
smhinsey wrote: post #8

It looks like a non-trivial portion of this is F#, so if you're interested in that, it might be worth poking around the github repo.

Funny, I actually cloned this repo last night to contribute. I really want to contribute because it's so useful and @jaredpar seems to be doing a shit ton of work all by himself. But the whole F# part is going to be a hurdle.

Yeah F# is a bit of a hurdle for contributors. In retrospect if I'd known I'd stick with the project this long I probably would've chosen C#.

https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/wiki/FAQ#wiki-language

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