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What Is Vim?

blog.jonas.foo

21–30 of 179 posts

Re: What Is Vim?

#21
post #19

>"Wha Is Vim" Something I've never learned. Not proud of it but I do not think I am missing anything either. I write native software for Linux for living at the moment.

No time like the present. Give it a try. Even if you just use it for editing /etc files it’s much more efficient than nano.

Don’t be intimidated by the huge feature set. I’ve been using it practically daily for 25 years and I still only use a small fraction of the available commands.

Re: What Is Vim?

#22
Even though I wince at mis remembered muscle memory using it, I still wish nvi had progressed a little further. I mostly turn off vim features. Default cut-paste with code indent is a giant mismatch. It's cruder, and itself a mishmash of non-joy code, but I found nvi suited me well for decades on netbsd and freebsd, and I use it still. I do run the port on osx but somehow each upgrade I find myself slipped back into vim. And on debian and the like.

I live in Emacs for org, and vi for code edit. Happy mix these last 40+ years.

Sometimes it's hard to recall that ex exists, inside vi. But if you do any :command that's where you are. Inside a simpler editor landscape embedded in the visual world.

Ed is a sometimes tool. Always gratifying to use it!

Re: What Is Vim?

#24
I recently gave up on VSCode because the Vim mode is still substandard, missing keybindings, and constantly glitches out in new and fun (read: not-fun) ways. I’m just gonna use NeoVim and program the IDE myself, in a true moment of going super-saiyan as a programmer

Re: What Is Vim?

#25
post #19

>"Wha Is Vim" Something I've never learned. Not proud of it but I do not think I am missing anything either. I write native software for Linux for living at the moment.

> I do not think I am missing anything either

How could you possibility know that unless you're familiar with Vim?

Re: What Is Vim?

#26
I’ve yet to get sucked into Vim, though I’ve given it a shot on a few occasions. I just feel too much muscle memory with whatever you call normal editing. One of these days I want to really stick with it because I do love the verb/action/modifier idea. I’m even building a similar keyboard-driven editor for building UIs. It has commands like “s a i” (select all images), “a t n” (add text element as next sibling), etc.

Re: What Is Vim?

#28

> There's a Vim mode in every single mainstream code editor out there. And they’re always frustratingly incomplete and/or buggy. Some motions will be unimplemented, or will behave incorrectly, especially with regards to boundaries around whitespace inclusion or exclusion in a motion. Things you added to Vim and got used to are unavailable, and so your ysa") to put parentheses around the string your cursor is on just…

Yep, it's apparently easier to move your IDE into vim than it is to move vim into your IDE.

The only vim mode I've met that wasn't infuriatingly incomplete was emacs evil mode.

Re: What Is Vim?

#29

> There's a Vim mode in every single mainstream code editor out there. And they’re always frustratingly incomplete and/or buggy. Some motions will be unimplemented, or will behave incorrectly, especially with regards to boundaries around whitespace inclusion or exclusion in a motion. Things you added to Vim and got used to are unavailable, and so your ysa") to put parentheses around the string your cursor is on just…

> And they’re always frustratingly incomplete and/or buggy

I refer to this as the Vim Uncanny Valley

Re: What Is Vim?

#30
Vim is efficient, in that there is no need for one's hands to leave the keyboard.

Vim is succinct, in that what is needed often takes less commands than those less frequent.

Vim is pliable, in that can be made to do whatever you wish.

Vim is everything, vim is nothing.

Mastering vim is to find Zen made possible by an exponential command space.

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