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Vim clutch

github.com

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Re: Vim clutch

#151

Post by freshhawk »

sliverstorm wrote: post #95
kamaal wrote: post #65

I don't know how this would work out ergonomically. My dad is a cab driver and he often complains that pressing the clutch with his foot often giving him RSI kind of pain. But however I think this is purely subjective. From an experiment perspective, this is really cool! And this generally qualifies into what could one call a 'real hack'. This has a air of freshness to it. Now the real power of vim is in getting into…

You have to learn h,j,k,l are not just navigational keys but also can be combined with multipliers like 20h(Moves 20 positions to the left). You know, I've understood this for a while, but to this day I still don't use it. I can't count characters that fast! If you're going to lean forward and count out chars, you might as well count them out with presses of 'h'.

I also never used that feature and I've been a heavy vim user for maybe 8 years.

Thanks to the relative line numbers patch being merged in finally (:set rnu and now you show line numbers relative to your cursor) you get easy moving up and down.

I prefer the easymotion plugin (https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion/) that annotates your file with little markers (like the vimperator/pentadactyl/vimium browser plugins use to click links with the keyboard) that allow you to jump around extraordinarily quickly.

It was, and still is, a learning curve since it adds to so many basic vim commands that are muscle memory for me by now but it's worth it.

Re: Vim clutch

#152

Post by jlgreco »

robomartin wrote: post #140
sofal wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With no justification of how you think a military helicopter cockpit is user friendly, I suspect you're just trolling now.

Your first personal attack was subtle: "I understand that you like to click through your menus" Now you resort to calling me a troll? That's nice. There's nothing unfriendly about a helicopter cockpit. Even if you've only played with flight simulators anyone half-way intelligent can probably figure out most of it within a few minutes. Flying one is a different deal, as mastering and understanding the complex relation…

Would you like programming with a thumb keyboard instead of a full-sized keyboard? That is how I feel typing in a text editor without a vi-like setting. The absence of vi style editing feels unnecessarily crippling.

If you don't feel the same, then whatever; nobody is trying to force vi style editing on you. I don't see what your issue here is, why is it that you seem so intent on discrediting the experiences of others?

Re: Vim clutch

#153

Post by jlgreco »

cdpc wrote: post #98
tyler_ball wrote: post #97

I did this a few months ago: imap kj I have never had to type a word with the letter combination 'kj' in it. Works great.

Until you use kj as a variable for KillJoy

Preventing me from doing that might actually be considered a feature. ;)

Re: Vim clutch

#154

Post by devth »

robomartin wrote: post #123
devth wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point that many developers choose vim over "modern" editors because of its highly efficient text-editing capabilities. The same points could be made about emacs. As to "user friendly" - depends on who the user is. Yes, this text box is infinitely more user friendly than vim when your mom is using it. That a foot-pedal might make vim more usable has nothing to do with vim being outdated or u…

OK, I'll bite. Please educate me. Give me a list of the "highly efficient text-editing capabilities".

If you know vim I'd assume you already know the answer. If you know vim and don't know the answer, I guess vim just doesn't work for you. But for many others, it does. I'm not going to enumerate what's already covered in endless blog posts, SO answers, books, IRC logs, and .vimrcs.

Re: Vim clutch

#155

Post by robomartin »

jlgreco wrote: post #152
robomartin wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first personal attack was subtle: "I understand that you like to click through your menus" Now you resort to calling me a troll? That's nice. There's nothing unfriendly about a helicopter cockpit. Even if you've only played with flight simulators anyone half-way intelligent can probably figure out most of it within a few minutes. Flying one is a different deal, as mastering and understanding the complex relation…

Would you like programming with a thumb keyboard instead of a full-sized keyboard? That is how I feel typing in a text editor without a vi-like setting. The absence of vi style editing feels unnecessarily crippling. If you don't feel the same, then whatever; nobody is trying to force vi style editing on you. I don't see what your issue here is, why is it that you seem so intent on discrediting the experiences of othe…

> why is it that you seem so intent on discrediting the experiences of others?

I think you are reading far too much into what I've commented. Nobody is doing that at all.

Re: Vim clutch

#156

Post by nelstrom »

kamaal wrote: post #65

I don't know how this would work out ergonomically. My dad is a cab driver and he often complains that pressing the clutch with his foot often giving him RSI kind of pain. But however I think this is purely subjective. From an experiment perspective, this is really cool! And this generally qualifies into what could one call a 'real hack'. This has a air of freshness to it. Now the real power of vim is in getting into…

You might like my book, Practical Vim. It's now available from the Pragmatic Bookshelf as a beta book: http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim

Re: Vim clutch

#158

Post by sofal »

robomartin wrote: post #140
sofal wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With no justification of how you think a military helicopter cockpit is user friendly, I suspect you're just trolling now.

Your first personal attack was subtle: "I understand that you like to click through your menus" Now you resort to calling me a troll? That's nice. There's nothing unfriendly about a helicopter cockpit. Even if you've only played with flight simulators anyone half-way intelligent can probably figure out most of it within a few minutes. Flying one is a different deal, as mastering and understanding the complex relation…

I've noticed that HN is particularly good among online forums about not squashing comments that go against tribal beliefs. Your first few comments, unlike this one, don't contain any justification whatsoever for your assertions. I don't downvote because somebody hates vim and it hurts my feelings. I downvote because somebody hates vim but doesn't feel like they need to justify why, they just want to say it.

Often people who have been downvoted assume that it's just because they've voiced a contrarian opinion, when in reality it's because they've made strong statements with no justification. Then they pretend like they don't care by accusing everyone else of hivemind mentality and proclaiming how much they don't care.

Now onto your argument. You say "programming is not factory work" and go on to say in many words that editing text is not the most important bottleneck in the way of programming efficiency. What surprises me here is that you think that this would somehow invalidate the use of an efficient text editor.

Nobody here is going to disagree with you that the thinking and the designing take more time than the actual typing of those ideas and designs into code. That's not the point. We're not suggesting that vim is solving your thinking problems, and just because vim makes text-editing faster doesn't mean that vim users naturally gravitate towards hacking out solutions without thinking. Nobody is counting keystrokes to measure their entire programming efficiency.

Vim is used for text-editing. Text-editing speed is not the core bottleneck for programming efficiency. You've stated this, but this fact does not at all justify your assertions that vim is a bad tool. Your response above is an attempt to minimize the act of text-editing, as if text-editing itself, rather than vim, is passé and unsophisticated. That is ridiculous. Programmers edit text files all the time, regardless of how smart and awesome their code generation tools are. Those tools don't reduce or obviate the need to edit text, they just provide better leverage; they increase the ratio of work done to the amount of text-editing.

Re: Vim clutch

#159

Post by robomartin »

jlgreco wrote: post #147
robomartin wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad comparison on my part at some level. Yes, I am a terrible VIM user. I have far more important things to do than to get good at using modem-age text editors. My efficiency comes from planning, not counting keystrokes.

> My efficiency comes from planning, not counting keystrokes. As if the two are mutually exclusive...

One (planning) results in efficiency gains that are far more significant than the other.

Re: Vim clutch

#160

Post by sofal »

robomartin wrote: post #149
robomartin wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first personal attack was subtle: "I understand that you like to click through your menus" Now you resort to calling me a troll? That's nice. There's nothing unfriendly about a helicopter cockpit. Even if you've only played with flight simulators anyone half-way intelligent can probably figure out most of it within a few minutes. Flying one is a different deal, as mastering and understanding the complex relation…

As a follow-up to that. When I hire programmers I only care about how well they can reduce a problem to a viable game-plan and how clean and well-documented their code might be. I could not give a crap about whether or not they are 3% more efficient at pounding out keystrokes on a text editor. We waste far more time in other areas than in the mechanics of editing code. In other words, if editor efficiency is adequate…

Your first couple of paragraphs are spot on, but they in no way justify your assertions about vim.

Your last paragraph suggests that learning an editor like vim takes up enough time that it detracts from learning important software engineering principles. I'd like to suggest that learning vim, though scary at first, is not nearly as bad as all that. You pick up more and more of it as you go, and the accumulated bits of time saved over a long period more than make up for the time you spent getting over the learning curve.

"Modem-era"? I assume you don't use any "modem-era" command line interfaces, programming languages, APIs, protocols, or operating systems.

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