31–40 of 218 posts
No advice on moving from line to line? Word and character movements are great (and well worth learning), but how do you suggest moving to just the next line without spamming `w`?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is ridiculous. Being "anti-vim" is perfectly alright with me. I use vim because it's the fastest thing I've ever used by a very wide margin. I also respect others who find it too hard to learn or find they're more productive elsewhere. But a comment that essentially boils down to "vim is archaic" in a post about vim usage habits is totally ridiculous, so in the nicest way possible, get lost.
> But a comment that essentially boils down to "vim is archaic" in a post about vim usage habits is totally ridiculous ... And entirely topical. Young programmers who read such posts may not realize how many more efficient options are now available. Speaking about vim as though it's an obvious choice in 2013 would be like insisting that everyone code in Fortran in 2013.
Otherwise - in a slightly less nice way than last time - get lost.
Then when I read the rest of the post, it definitely makes sense. I do use w, b quite frequently, and I don't use f, but I've found the vim-seek[1] plugin recently, and it seems to make more sense to use. It matches two rather than one character, which makes it much more precise.
I think the bottom line is to move around to the right place and that going one character at a time is less efficient. Not so much whether this movement is via hjkl or the arrow keys.
> Moving your Vim cursor around using the arrow keys is a bad habit ... Yes, as is having a keyboard with more than 64 keys, a pointing device, software that allows character insertion, deletion and cursor motion all without changing modes, or any computer designed after 1980. We must all fight against this rising tide of convenience and efficiency by insisting that everyone use vim and its descendants.
I have a pointing device that I like a lot for some purposes, but I don't use it for core work, since that revolves around manipulating a bunch of symbols found on the aforementioned keys, and not found on the pointing device. I call this convenience and efficiency.
vi and its descendants — actually TECO and its descendants — don't actually have ‘modes’ in the sense suggested. They have functions with arguments, and certain rules for combining these functions. What this article is trying to point out is that some of these functions take advantage of the correspondence between the symbols being manipulated and the symbols literally at the user's fingertips. I call this convenience and efficiency.
> Moving your Vim cursor around using the arrow keys is a bad habit ... Yes, as is having a keyboard with more than 64 keys, a pointing device, software that allows character insertion, deletion and cursor motion all without changing modes, or any computer designed after 1980. We must all fight against this rising tide of convenience and efficiency by insisting that everyone use vim and its descendants.
> Moving your Vim cursor around using the arrow keys is a bad habit ... Yes, as is having a keyboard with more than 64 keys, a pointing device, software that allows character insertion, deletion and cursor motion all without changing modes, or any computer designed after 1980. We must all fight against this rising tide of convenience and efficiency by insisting that everyone use vim and its descendants.
This comment is ridiculous. Being "anti-vim" is perfectly alright with me. I use vim because it's the fastest thing I've ever used by a very wide margin. I also respect others who find it too hard to learn or find they're more productive elsewhere. But a comment that essentially boils down to "vim is archaic" in a post about vim usage habits is totally ridiculous, so in the nicest way possible, get lost.
> This comment is ridiculous.
Yes. However, I would point out that eventually this productivity thing matters i.e. more productive developers will be able to effect more change in the world faster than less productive developers.
While I'm all for sharing knowledge, if my competition is putting creative effort into hobbling themselves, then I say leave them to it.
> I use vim because it's the fastest thing I've ever used by a very wide margin.
I used to think this, but then I paired with someone who was eye-wateringly fast with TextMate (that person has since converted to using vim full-time). Rather than speed, for me at least, its always been about fluency (how little cognitive load is there between thinking and the code appearing). I happen to be a lot faster than most IDE clowns I happen to be working with, but I believe that's a happy side-effect.
What I like about VIM people is they explain you that mouse is evil, arrow keys are evil and now the basic hjkl (btw corrected into hell in iPhone keyboard) are evil too. I have even see a guy at a ruby conf who were using only keystrokes to browse the web. I wonder how it deal with flash animation. Anyway so now, he can replace his trackpad with a swimming pool for worms of smugueness. That's pretty cool.
Try pentadactyl for a couple days. Once you get used to it you will not want to go back to being a mouse-pointer sharpshooter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is ridiculous. Being "anti-vim" is perfectly alright with me. I use vim because it's the fastest thing I've ever used by a very wide margin. I also respect others who find it too hard to learn or find they're more productive elsewhere. But a comment that essentially boils down to "vim is archaic" in a post about vim usage habits is totally ridiculous, so in the nicest way possible, get lost.
> But a comment that essentially boils down to "vim is archaic" in a post about vim usage habits is totally ridiculous ... And entirely topical. Young programmers who read such posts may not realize how many more efficient options are now available. Speaking about vim as though it's an obvious choice in 2013 would be like insisting that everyone code in Fortran in 2013.
No advice on moving from line to line? Word and character movements are great (and well worth learning), but how do you suggest moving to just the next line without spamming `w`?
and - to move 1 line up. Combine with a number, 4+ to move down 4 lines, complementing 4G or :4 to move to 4th line.
> Moving your Vim cursor around using the arrow keys is a bad habit ... Yes, as is having a keyboard with more than 64 keys, a pointing device, software that allows character insertion, deletion and cursor motion all without changing modes, or any computer designed after 1980. We must all fight against this rising tide of convenience and efficiency by insisting that everyone use vim and its descendants.
This isn't about being some old fogey who's stuck in the 80s. It's good ergonomics to avoid hand movements away from the home row to the arrow keys or the mouse. My wrists have felt significantly better since I went cold turkey on the arrow keys.