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What Is Vim?

blog.jonas.foo

121–130 of 179 posts

Re: What Is Vim?

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And meanwhile in every thread or article about vim, it is very rare to mention remapping Caps Lock to Escape (or the other lesser IMHO lesser options ) even though one third of user do it. The other two third are deluded tool fetishists that are ready to suffer that their most important key is the furthest away from the home of row because "you get used to it" even if that's just an unfortunate historical accident. I…

> it is very rare to mention remapping Caps Lock to Escape I change mine to Ctrl. This way escape for me is Ctrl + [. Ctrl is too useful to be in an awkward position.

I have mapped Caps Lock to both Ctrl and Escape simultaneously. If you just tap it it's Escape and if you hold it down it's Ctrl, and it's easy to accomplish with xcape.

Re: What Is Vim?

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vim stands for "Vi IMproved" so it literally is meant to be an improvement, and IMO it really is although plain old Vi is still better than most editors.

Re: What Is Vim?

#123

Vim is not only an editing language, but a fast-starting editor with a small-ish native executable, and small run-time memory use. This facet is typically not ported into other editors that have a Vim mode. Vim runs natively inside virtual machines and containers, on resource-constrained embedded systems, and on remotely accessed machines. Another aspect is that Vim can be operated entirely using a terminal emulator,…

The reason I chose Vim over Emacs is simply because of the fact that it's available literally EVERYWHERE. I've honestly never seen a UNIX system which doesn't have Vi or Vim installed by default. Emacs is more hit and miss.

You should read the article. Vim does run everywhere, including inside Emacs. You don't "choose vim over Emacs," you choose vim, and optionally Emacs if you want to use Emacs in whatever context. evil-mode is a great vim; using that won't stop a vim user from using native C vim instead of emacs lisp vim when logged into a remote system

(source: vim user for twenty years, Emacs ten)

Re: What Is Vim?

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Vim offer over Nano? After using both I settled on Nano years ago and still don't see how my workflow would improve with Vim.

Are you being serious? Vim offers so much more advanced features. But if you don't have a use for those advanced features of Vim Nano is probably more than enough for your use case. I just find Vim more enjoyable to use even for simple tasks since the commands are already in my brain and I really prefer the modality.

guy has a seriously simple use case

Re: What Is Vim?

#125

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…

I've set up myself once to learn Helix. First there was Kakoune that sounded exciting with its new modal model, but what had me wanting to really give Helix a go, beyond being exciting, was that it advertised itself "batteries included". It promised to deliver all the cool things programmers' editors do recently. But then I stopped abruptly when realized Helix misses a key feature of Vim: swap files. I can just start…

Does anyone else use swap files? Personally, I find them annoying. Saving every time I leave insert mode is my preferred alternative: `autocmd! InsertLeave * silent! update`

Perhaps helix has something similar?

Re: What Is Vim?

#126

> 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…

For me, they’re unusable. Many have tried to shoehorn Vim mode into other editors. It just doesn’t fit, degrade both developer experience and the editor itself

Re: What Is Vim?

#129

I am too stupid for Vim. The bottleneck is my brain, not my typing speed.

Here is some material to challenge that idea:

https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/

Is also funny to phrase it in terms of bottlenecks because bottleneck optimization is an 80/20 approach to performance. People who are serious about perf don’t practice it.

80/20 is good for once a month tasks. When it comes to the primary work I do everyday I don’t want to leave 20% on the table.

Re: What Is Vim?

#130

Vim is not only an editing language, but a fast-starting editor with a small-ish native executable, and small run-time memory use. This facet is typically not ported into other editors that have a Vim mode. Vim runs natively inside virtual machines and containers, on resource-constrained embedded systems, and on remotely accessed machines. Another aspect is that Vim can be operated entirely using a terminal emulator,…

Zed feels quite as fast as vim though, and has remote ssh for remote hosts

And you don't have to suffer latency when working on machines with 300ms latency

I still use vim when I need to quickly edit some file on some remote host once, but for see no reason to use it over zed in other cases

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