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Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons (2020)

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Re: Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons (2020)

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no objective evidence that Vim makes you a more productive programmer. There is no evidence that avoiding a mouse makes you a more productive programmer. Use the editor you want! Vim is faster at some things and slower at some things. The main drawback of all the keypresses you see is that Vim is an imperative editor: You have to tell Vim how to edit text by glueing together lots of small commands.* IDEs are…

> Ask your local Vim nerd to rename the file they're editing. It will be entertaining! Oh that’s easy though, friend :) :!git mv % new-name > IDEs are declarative editors, you say "rename this variable" and they do it. Most NeoVim setups I’ve tried recently include LSPs with code actions, so now I just hover a variable and do “ ra” and I get a little popup window asking me for a new name. I type it, hit enter, and th…

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Re: Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons (2020)

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10 keystrokes and only works inside vim And every other tool that supports it. I use it everywhere, window manager, terminal and every terminal program I use (via readline), my browser, and the list goes on. I rarely have to reach for my mouse, if I do it's frustrating and breaks my flow and I will fix it next time I have a few minutes to spare. I even have a shell script to move the cursor out of the way.

Someone still has to specifically add vim-support and you need to enable it. My method is the default working method for every single piece of software.

Now you're just grasping for straws. By adding one line in ~/.inputrc i have vim magic in just about every TUI program available (in theory some may not, but I've yet to encounter it). Don't make it sound more difficult than it is just to make a point.

Lots of tools for power-users come with vim keys today, and when I choose a tool it's one of the first things I look for.

Re: Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons (2020)

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone still has to specifically add vim-support and you need to enable it. My method is the default working method for every single piece of software.

Now you're just grasping for straws. By adding one line in ~/.inputrc i have vim magic in just about every TUI program available (in theory some may not, but I've yet to encounter it). Don't make it sound more difficult than it is just to make a point. Lots of tools for power-users come with vim keys today, and when I choose a tool it's one of the first things I look for.

You are saying that a more complicated setup and harder to learn tool is superior. Not sure i get your point. Parent has a point with the number of keystrokes.

Re: Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons (2020)

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone still has to specifically add vim-support and you need to enable it. My method is the default working method for every single piece of software.

Now you're just grasping for straws. By adding one line in ~/.inputrc i have vim magic in just about every TUI program available (in theory some may not, but I've yet to encounter it). Don't make it sound more difficult than it is just to make a point. Lots of tools for power-users come with vim keys today, and when I choose a tool it's one of the first things I look for.

TUI yes.

Now do it for 3 different browsers and all browser-based services you need to use daily (Like Confluence, Jira and Github).

Re: Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons (2020)

#76
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't use VSCode myself, many students and faculty at my school did, and the VSCode SSH extension seems to have some performance issues. It works by copying a server binary onto the remote computer; however, that process is quite heavy in terms of resource usage on the remote, using hundreds of MB of RAM in usual cases (which adds up when you have hundreds of students doing their assignments on one server), a…

This sounds exactly like what I would expect from VSCode, and why I'm glad I never touched it with a 10 foot pole...

You wouldn't need ssh at such short distance.

Re: Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons (2020)

#77

I'm a big fan of Vim, but I hardly use it as my primary editor anymore (applies for Neovim as well). I think the ecosystem is amazing, but I hardly have the patience to set things up to feature parity with other editors. Debuggers are the biggest missing/hard to configure feature. I do, however, use Vim bindings in every editor that supports them (and extensions for browsers like Vimium). The extensions/Editor functi…

> Debuggers are the biggest missing/hard to configure feature. Do you know about :termdebug and what are you missing with it? It's just dbg hooked into vim, and you can use any other compatible debugger instead if you prefer, for example rr. That's the beauty of vim, the tools you use are the tools you'd use in your terminal anyway.

I did not, this is interesting. I'll look into this, thanks!

Re: Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons (2020)

#78

What is the consensus on productivity with Vim? I have thought about trying out the keyboard only approach, but haven't wanted to invest time in it yet. When I see people on YouTube using Vim it slightly feels like there's a whole lot of keypresses happening, but not a lot is actually gained compared to using a mouse or even frequently it seems it takes a while to do something that is much quicker with the mouse. I u…

Personally, I'm just used to the bindings and I strongly prefer the editing experience, and think about navigating text via Vim bindings as a matter of habit.

The biggest "productivity" changes for me in any IDE/Editor is the ability to fuzzy find for an arbitrary symbol, a keybinding to search for and subsequently open a file, LSP features like "goto definition", "find all references" (and jump back to where I was quickly) etc.

Re: Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons (2020)

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10 keystrokes and only works inside vim And every other tool that supports it. I use it everywhere, window manager, terminal and every terminal program I use (via readline), my browser, and the list goes on. I rarely have to reach for my mouse, if I do it's frustrating and breaks my flow and I will fix it next time I have a few minutes to spare. I even have a shell script to move the cursor out of the way.

Someone still has to specifically add vim-support and you need to enable it. My method is the default working method for every single piece of software.

> My method is the default working method for every single piece of software.

You can do as you want of course, but that feels like you're limiting yourself to the point of absurdity.

Re: Don't use Vim for the wrong reasons (2020)

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you're just grasping for straws. By adding one line in ~/.inputrc i have vim magic in just about every TUI program available (in theory some may not, but I've yet to encounter it). Don't make it sound more difficult than it is just to make a point. Lots of tools for power-users come with vim keys today, and when I choose a tool it's one of the first things I look for.

TUI yes. Now do it for 3 different browsers and all browser-based services you need to use daily (Like Confluence, Jira and Github).

Github already has vim inspired keys (/ to search, gX to navigate and so on), I don't use Confluence or Jira but a quick search shows me they also have some (/ to search, gX to navigate, n/p for next/previous) without changing any settings. All your examples has vim keys without me doing anything at all.

In my browsers I use vimium, and you can embed actual neovim into textboxes with a few different addons, one of them firenvim. I rarely use GUI though and that's my point, I don't have to since 95% of my work is in the terminal.

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