Vim users: stop using hjkl • Hacker News Board

Re: Vim users: stop using hjkl

#201

Post by Riesling » Sat, Mar 02, 2013, 1:49 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #152

lutusp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure if just trolling, but if not it seems you're not very experienced yet in the use of the tools of the trade of the professional programmer. [emphasis added] Guess again -- I wrote Apple Writer in the late 1970s ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer ). One of my goals was to eliminate the modes that plagued contemporary editors and attract people interested in ease of use and efficiency. Apple Writer b…

I am so glad to see someone else with perspective at least make their voice heard. This vim thing is absolute lunacy. I was booting machines from scratch thirty years ago with Forth and writing my own text editors to be able to program the machine. I used crippled keyboards without mice, function keys and cursor buttons. And I gladly said goodbye to that crap years ago. Then you come to a place like HN and you have "…

> As I have said before, show me one company, one project, that has some in on time, budget and without bugs because of their choice of vim over even something like Notepad and I'll eat my words.

Show me one transportation company that would fail because their trucks do not have air conditioning or power steering.

Is it nice to have those things, especially if you drive around the entire day? Of couse.

I'm with you that vim should not be a cult. But calling it a shit interface is over the top. If it was, why are there so many popular vim emulation plugins for many of the modern IDEs.

Re: Vim users: stop using hjkl

#202

Post by elwin » Sat, Mar 02, 2013, 4:50 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #192

elwin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that Pico is easy to use. The only way to move around within a line is to hit the arrow keys sixty times. By default, cut and paste works on whole lines only. If you want to cut just one word you have to figure out the commands for select mode.

> I disagree that Pico is easy to use. I didn't say Pico was easy to use. I said it was easier to use than vi/vim.

Then I shall be clearer and say that I disagree that vi/vim is harder to use than an editor that needs a command-line flag to enable search-and-replace and doesn't do case-insensitive search at all.

Re: Vim users: stop using hjkl

#203

Post by LinXitoW » Sat, Mar 02, 2013, 4:55 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #200

ken_railey wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the context of starting, launching, growing, evolving and maintaining a tech business Possibly, but some people are not starting, launching, growing, or evolving anything but software - and a text editor is where 99% of that work happens.

That's interesting. I would say that somewhere between 50% to 75% of my time when creating a software product is devoted to documenting requirements, analyzing the problem, studying candidate solutions, working out such things as state diagrams with, yes, paper and pencil and, in general, thinking and planning. I haven't measured it but I'd venture to say that actual time typing code is probably somewhere in the orde…

Its nice for you that you're advanced in your carrier that coding is such a small part of what you do, but its obvious that theres enough people that arent quite as godlike as you. Good for you.

Personally, the one thing vim(and Linux) have taught me is that mastering your tools is hard in the short but entirely worth it in the long run. Do really never learn shortcuts or concepts or the tools you use? A language is just as much a tool as a text editor.

How much of your time did you waste here, religiously debating religious vim users? At least from here(the internet can distort things) it seems you're just as religiously anti as they are pro.

Re: Vim users: stop using hjkl

#204

Post by ken_railey » Sat, Mar 02, 2013, 5:55 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #199

ken_railey wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's exaggerate in order to enhance the effect. Let's not, they are entirely irrelevant. Noone is claiming that any specific tool will make your startup succeed, or fix your bugs, or add features to your software for you - I thought we were discussing text editors.

I don't know what you are discussing. I am discussing the absolute fact that focusing on any real or imaginary gains that could be had by insisting on using any editor at all is ridiculous in the context of where the real problems are in developing software products.

Ok, I concede - lets just use punch cards.

Re: Vim users: stop using hjkl

#205

Post by hartator » Sat, Mar 02, 2013, 6:49 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #25

hartator wrote: post #16

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.

We don't deal with flash. We curse the foolish website developer and route its domain to /dev/null. Using VIM.

Anyway, why use the web when you can use directly sockets? Faster, more secure and grep-compliant.

Re: Vim users: stop using hjkl

#206

Post by robomartin » Sat, Mar 02, 2013, 7:37 PM UTC

LinXitoW wrote: post #203

robomartin wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I would say that somewhere between 50% to 75% of my time when creating a software product is devoted to documenting requirements, analyzing the problem, studying candidate solutions, working out such things as state diagrams with, yes, paper and pencil and, in general, thinking and planning. I haven't measured it but I'd venture to say that actual time typing code is probably somewhere in the orde…

Its nice for you that you're advanced in your carrier that coding is such a small part of what you do, but its obvious that theres enough people that arent quite as godlike as you. Good for you. Personally, the one thing vim(and Linux) have taught me is that mastering your tools is hard in the short but entirely worth it in the long run. Do really never learn shortcuts or concepts or the tools you use? A language is…

There's a big difference. Now I have the luxury of time. That was not the case ten years ago.

Re: Vim users: stop using hjkl

#207

Post by zargon » Sat, Mar 02, 2013, 9:15 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #191

falcolas wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it is two keystrokes instead of one. Technically, it's three keystrokes instead of two. And you have to commit ctrl-s (or cmd-s if you're on a mac) to memory just as much as you do :w. Nothing really saved there. > The "cheat sheets" I refer to are those that map multiple-keystroke sequences to the actions that, in a modern editor, require one keystroke. Like delete the next four words? How do I do that in a mo…

> I'm glad you like your modern editors (there's lots there to love), but they are not inherently better than vim just because they're non-modal. Yes, in point of fact, they are better than vi/vim because they are non-modal. When all is said and done, dropping vi's modes makes an editor better and more efficient. > Like delete the next four words? How do I do that in a modern editor with a single keystroke? You can't…

You were the one who claimed all the multi-keystroke shortcuts were possible in one keystroke, not falcolas.

Plenty of us switched to vim after using mouse-oriented editors for years or decades. Why are you so offended that we have different preferences than you?

Re: Vim users: stop using hjkl

#208

Post by nessus42 » Sat, Mar 02, 2013, 11:51 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #102

roel_v wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if just trolling, but if not it seems you're not very experienced yet in the use of the tools of the trade of the professional programmer. The point of using the vi interface is nowadays (and yes I know about the original reasons of the modal workings of vi...) that moving your fingers off the home row takes too much effort, let alone having to move your hand to the mouse. It's easier to drive an automatic,…

> Not sure if just trolling, but if not it seems you're not very experienced yet in the use of the tools of the trade of the professional programmer. [emphasis added] Guess again -- I wrote Apple Writer in the late 1970s ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer ). One of my goals was to eliminate the modes that plagued contemporary editors and attract people interested in ease of use and efficiency. Apple Writer b…

> One of my goals was to eliminate the modes that plagued contemporary editors and attract people interested in ease of use and efficiency.

I certainly bought into this line of reasoning when I learned Emacs instead of vi all those years ago. These days I'm not so sure. Me, RMS, and most of my Emacs-using friends have developed carpal tunnel syndrome, while the people I know that use vi have mostly not. Furthermore I can feel my fingers hurt every time I have to type C-M-something or M-something C-something M-something C-something. This sort of stuff is rampant in Emacs, not to mention Eclipse and all the other IDEs that I know of, and from what I can tell of vi, seems to be less so in vi.

Re: Vim users: stop using hjkl

#209

Post by nessus42 » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 12:14 AM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #85

JulianWasTaken wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This may come as a surprise, but modern programming editors don't require the operator to switch between three mutually exclusive modes -- insert, delete and navigate. That's because modern keyboards have keys dedicated to those purposes, which means the operator doesn't have to either wonder which mode he is in, or switch modes, which saves an enormous amount of time when programming. You speak as if modal editing…

> You speak as if modal editing came first and universally agreed upon better things evolved afterwards. That's exactly what happened, and think before objecting, because I was there. I used vi while working for NASA during the 1970s, when mode changes made sense (it saved paper on paper terminals). Since then, it has stopped making sense. > I know this isn't true. I know you know this isn't true. You're being highly…

> I can't believe there are people who haven't learned this elementary lesson now, over 30 years later

Why would you let something like this bother you? There are many popular text editors and IDEs in the world, and of all these myriad, there is only one popular editor that is modeful: vi. Why would you begrudge the people who prefer to do their editing modefully, a single editor that does things this way?

It's not like vi is going to corrupt the yout's of today, as the yout's are fully exposed to IDEs such as Eclipse, IDEA, Xcode, and Visual Studio, all of which are modeless, not to mention Word, Pages, Google Docs, etc.

Re: Vim users: stop using hjkl

#210

Post by JulianWasTaken » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 12:45 AM UTC

marssaxman wrote: post #185

JulianWasTaken wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This may come as a surprise, but modern programming editors don't require the operator to switch between three mutually exclusive modes -- insert, delete and navigate. That's because modern keyboards have keys dedicated to those purposes, which means the operator doesn't have to either wonder which mode he is in, or switch modes, which saves an enormous amount of time when programming. You speak as if modal editing…

Modal editing did come first, and universally agreed upon better things did evolve afterwards. I remember "modes are bad" being established UI-design wisdom as long ago as the mid-'80s, after the Macintosh came out and everyone started moving toward graphical interfaces. I'm surprised there is anything about this question which is seen as being open to debate here in 2013.

No. It didn't. The first editors were not modal.

And no, universally agreed upon better things did not evolve afterwards. I have no idea what the numbers are, but Vim is immensely popular amongst developers and I would highly suspect more popular amongst experienced developers than any editor whose name isn't emacs.

You are deluding yourself if you think that the modern world uses modal editors because their ancestors had keyboards that were too cramped.