31–40 of 198 posts
Interesting the history is varied for such a simple tool. I am but a lowly mouse/GUI user so rarely have to dwell in a shell, but I learnt the basics of vi in my 1st year of university and never forgotten. Gotten me out of many a pickle being able to reliably edit a file quickly.
...and presumably quit vi once you're done!
I consider my vi/vim skills to be extremely minimalist subset, and probably horribly inefficient, since they were developed to work accross a broad range of UNIX systems (SCO, Solaris, HP-UX, OSF, AIX) and I rarely add anything to my vim configs on top of that other than syntax highlighting. But I'd still rather use it than just about any other text editor, just for the simplicity of that muscle memory alone. I have…
But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/. Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE.
I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before.
P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot of new keybindings to learn, but Dusty Phillips's book gives you a gentle on-ramp to learning most of them.
I have nothing against Vi or Emacs, but since I strongly prefer GUI and mouse over terminal I use GUI editors. When I don't have a GUI available, I use micro, nano, joe.
Vim on the other hand never felt like it benefited much from a GUI, or like it had a very good one available. I just use neovim in a terminal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Helix's selection-action feels way more natural to me than vi/vim's action-selection.
Had someone else parrot this line to me the other day, but I remain unconvinced. Especially when vim has visual mode, and you often can make a select before doing something to it. v$ to select from cursor to end of line, then d to cut or y to copy. Is that not the sort of thing you mean? Is visual mode in vim just underused? Recently I was trying to find a good way to delete from the current position backward to anot…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Helix's selection-action feels way more natural to me than vi/vim's action-selection.
Had someone else parrot this line to me the other day, but I remain unconvinced. Especially when vim has visual mode, and you often can make a select before doing something to it. v$ to select from cursor to end of line, then d to cut or y to copy. Is that not the sort of thing you mean? Is visual mode in vim just underused? Recently I was trying to find a good way to delete from the current position backward to anot…
Why is that handy? Well, the idea is that you're probably already looking at the point on the screen you want to move the cursor to, so instead of figuring out a complex navigation, you can type a few keys: `s` plus the letters you're looking at. Then pause for a quarter-second, and type the letter that just appeared where you're looking at. The label letters will be chosen such that none of them appear after the text you typed, e.g. if the words "car", "cat", and "can" all appear in your document, then after you press `sca` the labels `r`, `t`, and `n` will never be chosen. (But the label `d` might be chosen if the word "cad", or words containing it such as "academic", never appear in the document).
It took a little getting used to, but now I've found it's quite the fastest way to issue commands. Want to delete everything from here to that closing parenthesis right there? If you're on its matching open parenthesis then `d%` is fastest, but if you're not, then `ds)` followed by split-second pause to see the label appear (in a bright contrasting color), then type the label. Quite a bit faster than `v` plus a bunch of movement, in my experience. Once you get used to it, it really speeds you up.
And when you get down to it, isn't "once you get used to it, it really speeds you up" a description of the entire vi family of editors in the first place?
I consider my vi/vim skills to be extremely minimalist subset, and probably horribly inefficient, since they were developed to work accross a broad range of UNIX systems (SCO, Solaris, HP-UX, OSF, AIX) and I rarely add anything to my vim configs on top of that other than syntax highlighting. But I'd still rather use it than just about any other text editor, just for the simplicity of that muscle memory alone. I have…
I can't say I agree. To me this is equivalent to saying "I have way more music in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a piano". The tool you use for 8+ hours a day is extremely important and even small gains will pay dividends over the long run. The more efficiently the text editor allows you to do tasks, the more time you have to think about other tasks.
I consider my vi/vim skills to be extremely minimalist subset, and probably horribly inefficient, since they were developed to work accross a broad range of UNIX systems (SCO, Solaris, HP-UX, OSF, AIX) and I rarely add anything to my vim configs on top of that other than syntax highlighting. But I'd still rather use it than just about any other text editor, just for the simplicity of that muscle memory alone. I have…
I never edited the default config much. But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/ . Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE. I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before. P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot…
I wrote about how it works in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118585 so I won't repeat that here. But if I had to pick my favorite feature from LazyVim's config... well, actually it would probably be something else, but `s` is definitely in the top three by now.