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What Is Vim?

blog.jonas.foo

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Re: What Is Vim?

#31

Post by teeray »

danielvaughn wrote: post #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.

> I just feel too much muscle memory with whatever you call normal editing.

You end up the same with Vim eventually. After almost 13 years of using it, I sometimes have to actually type the things I do to articulate what command it is. I also had a moment where someone said, “it’s just like the ‘p’ command in normal mode” and I had to really think about what they meant—in my head I’m just like “put line” and it just happens.

Re: What Is Vim?

#33

Post by ofalkaed »

chrismorgan wrote: post #9

> 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.

My favorite is all the applications which have a vim mode and are clearly done by people who think that just means making hjkl act like arrow keys and adding in a few single key commands. I wish more people would take the time to understand what modal editing actually is.

In a project of mine which has an editor that is pretty much vim with a few modifications to suit my purposes and slimmed down to just the needed features, I added an optional emacs mode which can be enabled with C-M-e M-S-m, it enables emacs in evil mode.

Re: What Is Vim?

#34

Post by FpUser »

theonething wrote: post #25
FpUser wrote: 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?

I played with it and do not think I need it.

Re: What Is Vim?

#35

Post by adamnemecek »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #32
adamnemecek wrote: post #27

[flagged]

Would you say that software, in general, is improving in the year of our lord 2024? We may have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Going back may be the answer.

Ok, if Vim is supposed to be an improvement, may god have mercy on us all.

Re: What Is Vim?

#36

Post by FpUser »

cbsks wrote: post #21
FpUser wrote: 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.

>"Give it a try"

I have. Not my cup of tea. Small file I edit in nano / whatever else. Anything serious is remote editing using some IDE. The terminal I use also has SSH file browser where you can click on file and edit it locally using any editor. It will be saved back to where it came from.

Re: What Is Vim?

#37

Post by wycy »

Learning vim was one of the best things I did for myself at work. Completely changed everything about the way I work and made me so much faster.

Re: What Is Vim?

#38

Post by dizhn »

chrismorgan wrote: post #9

> 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…

This ctrl+w shortcut gets me all the time when using a web based Spice session to work on VMs and the experience is similar to getting wired earphones yanked out of your ear. There might be a way to inhibit this behavior but I never looked into it because I use it to close browser tabs too.

Re: What Is Vim?

#39

Post by hexomancer »

chrismorgan wrote: post #9

> 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…

Can you give example of vim features that you miss in the vscode plugin? Mainly because I likely don't know about them and I would like to add them to my toolkit (the surround thing is not a vim feature, it is a plugin, although the vscode plugin has that too)

Re: What Is Vim?

#40

Post by toenail »

lambda_lord wrote: post #4

Helix uses a selection-first action model: you select the word/paragraph/whatever you want to perform an action on, then you change/delete/whatever on that selection. I think this is more intuitive than the "verb object" model Vim uses: if you get your selection wrong in Vim, you then need to undo the action and try again. In Helix, I can see what I am about to manipulate before I make the action. I think at this poi…

Huh, you can do visual selections in vim as well, and manipulate what you selected.
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