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Vim Creep

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Re: Vim Creep

#151

Post by einhverfr »

babarock wrote: post #93
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #73

This is an extremely awesome, fantastic, exhilarating use of hyperbole. What I gained from the article wasn't any explanation of why Vim is great; indeed, there was little included in this respect, aside from moving "entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger." Even the cool feeling of proficiency you get from knowing a tool well, and the fun of getting to show off a skill to a "how did he do that!?" audience w…

Also, years of evangelism will teach you that you cannot convince someone that Vim is better , let alone great . A lot of the propaganda out there starts by telling people "you're doing it wrong! Let me show you the better way!". Vim is one of these tools that isn't obviously better, so that you don't really understand its power until you try it (for a few months or so). I enjoyed this article exactly because the aut…

Exactly. This is one reason why I never tell people they are wrong regarding a choice of text editors. Keep in mind I usually have multiple VIM instances open and an instance of gedit (because I do some things that VIM is a little clumsy at regarding my todo list).

What I usually say is something like:

There are text editors and then there are text editors. If you are only spending a few hours a month in front of a text editor, you are probably better off with something simple. If, on the other hand, you are going to be using it all the time, it is well worth your time to learn an industrial strength one like VIM or EMACS. These have learning curves, but they have big payoffs as well regarding productivity.

Re: Vim Creep

#152

Post by roryokane »

silentbicycle wrote: post #146
SCdF wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple carots, the minimap and ST2 picking your indentation strategy automatically by looking at the file (I work with badly formatted legacy code a bit, there is no project-level strategy that applies) are the three reasons I bought it.

Some of my coworkers use sublime, and have been very excited about it. I used vim for several years and use emacs now, so probably a hard sell. Still, I get curious when people are Really Excited about other editors (because there may be ideas worth stealing and adding to emacs ;) ). What's the "minimap", the scrollbar that is a shrunken version of the document? The "multiple carets" feature seems handy. Are there an…

Yes, the minimap is what you guessed it was. Other ST features that Vim/Emacs don’t have (by default, at least):

• You can use proportional fonts (I use Verdana)

• The interface chrome is graphical, not text in a grid. This allows nice details such as a drop-shadow from the minimap when it covers the text and proportional fonts in the file tree’s filenames.

• On a Mac with smooth scrolling, you can scroll smoothly pixel-by-pixel, instead of choppily line-by-line.

• You can easily rename a variable, by using Command-D repeatedly to select the instances of the names inside multiple carets. But I usually forget to do this until after I’ve already renamed just one instance of the variable, and then I can’t select the other instances without undoing that edit first, so it’s not that useful.

• It uses Python as its scripting language, so you can use Python libraries easily, and don’t have to learn an editor-specific language. Similarly, it uses JSON for settings.

But Sublime Text doesn’t have nearly as many editing shortcuts by default as Vim. For instance, there isn’t any hot-key to select inside a quoted string – Expand Selection to Scope is the closest, but it’s hard to predict what it will do and so it isn’t very reliable. You can enable Vintage mode, which emulates many Vim key-bindings and thus gives you access to that power. That mode has a few small problems – the biggest one for me is that the Esc shortcut to exit the current mode sometimes conflicts with the Esc shortcut to remove extra carets so you have just one.

It’s too bad Sublime Text isn’t open source. Its plugin API doesn’t allow setting tabstops manually, which I would like so I could write a plugin implementing true elastic tabstops. Since I can’t implement it myself, I have no option but to beg the developer to implement that and wait.

Re: Vim Creep

#153

Post by solutionyogi »

mun2mun wrote: post #79
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #73

This is an extremely awesome, fantastic, exhilarating use of hyperbole. What I gained from the article wasn't any explanation of why Vim is great; indeed, there was little included in this respect, aside from moving "entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger." Even the cool feeling of proficiency you get from knowing a tool well, and the fun of getting to show off a skill to a "how did he do that!?" audience w…

Just watch the video of the page http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/11/screencast-custom-vim-re... to get the gist of "entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger".

Wow. That guy's VimFu is crazy. I wish I was half as fast as he is.

Re: Vim Creep

#154

Post by neckbeard »

jdludlow wrote: post #21

My first week in college a distant relative of mine at the same school pulled me into the Sun lab. The sum-total of his instructions were: * This is how you log in. * This is ls. * This is cd. * This is man. * This is apropos. * Learn vi. * Have fun. What came from that 5 minute intro to Unix has been applied orders of magnitude more often than anything from 5 years of an EE degree.

Not to detract from your point, which was similar to my intro to Unix, but I've always preferred 'man -k' to apropos, because it means remembering only one command plus it is slightly less typing.

Re: Vim Creep

#155

Post by SCdF »

SwellJoe wrote: post #131
SCdF wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On IDEs: I have the 'pleasure' of being one of those chaps who spends parts of his day job reworking massive Java projects. There is no way in hell I'm touching that without an editor that deeply understands Java.

There are multiple variables in your equation. You may be altering the wrong one.

I was editing for brevity, there are some awesome things about my job that balance the terrible.

Re: Vim Creep

#156

Post by mixmastamyk »

crazygringo wrote: post #13

This feels like an article about a religion or cult, not a software program. I just don't get it. Ever since newer editors got block editing or multiple insertion cursors, and RegEx find & replace across multiple files, and searching filenames to open... I feel like I've already got everything I need! What am I missing out on? I don't feel like my text editor holds back my productivity. Using something like Sublime,…

When I'm coding the bottleneck is my brain, not input speed... so vim seems like a micro-optimization to me.

I use CUA and can be productive everywhere immediately, even if it may be a bit less efficient.

Re: Vim Creep

#157

Post by mixmastamyk »

rahoulb wrote: post #113
recursive wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're into that sort of thing, you can do Ctrl + F, bar in Sublime too. Most of the comparisons in this discussion between vim and non vim demonstrate high proficiency in vim, but not as much elsewhere. Of course you are more proficient in the tool you know best.

As a heavy user of Sublime, Coda 2 and someone that is still getting to grips with vim, I'd say the real advantage of vim is you can do all of that over ssh with minimal keystrokes over a crappy connection.

You can use any editor over ssh these days. Just mount it with sshfs.

Re: Vim Creep

#158

Post by re_todd »

babarock wrote: post #93
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #73

This is an extremely awesome, fantastic, exhilarating use of hyperbole. What I gained from the article wasn't any explanation of why Vim is great; indeed, there was little included in this respect, aside from moving "entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger." Even the cool feeling of proficiency you get from knowing a tool well, and the fun of getting to show off a skill to a "how did he do that!?" audience w…

Also, years of evangelism will teach you that you cannot convince someone that Vim is better , let alone great . A lot of the propaganda out there starts by telling people "you're doing it wrong! Let me show you the better way!". Vim is one of these tools that isn't obviously better, so that you don't really understand its power until you try it (for a few months or so). I enjoyed this article exactly because the aut…

I love Vim, but I don't ever recommend it to anyone. I think it gives me an advantage. Whey would I want other people using it and thus lose that advantage?

Re: Vim Creep

#160

Post by Xcelerate »

You know, I'm doing an experiment like this with Tetris. I was looking at the world record for 40 line clear (20.55 seconds at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUUKKuye24) and I realized that the limit is not how fast he thinks, but how fast he is pressing the keys.

So I designed my own system. One key press drops the piece instantly into the correct spot, with the correct rotation. It's making my brain hurt practicing because it requires so much thinking, but once I get it into muscle memory, things are going to get really interesting. My 40 line best using the arrow keys is 45 seconds and with my new scheme it is 2:21. But I'm dropping time quickly and I'm sure very soon I'll beat my record.

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