21–30 of 145 posts
Your configuration is always evolving - so don't fret if a plugin or a setting is not working for you, it just means its gotto go..
That said focus on `your productivity` over a religious choice of an editor. You actually got to live with it for decades to come. choose the right one which fits your use case.
Using vi is not bad, its a "penance". Emacs is the real editor! So says Richard Stallman. :-)
Normally I'd respect something RMS said and I love him for his conviction but on this we must disagree :)
> Vim is the worst editor ... except all the other editors Yes to the first five words, no to the rest. How many Vim users realize that some of its more infuriating behaviors can be traced back to its predecessor vi, which had to be able operate with a "paper terminal", essentially a roll of paper as a display, without wasting too much paper during editing? And how do I know this? During my time at NASA designing par…
In today's terms, the above "without wasting too much paper during editing" argument translates into "with as few keystrokes as possible". In some situations, I definitely find my ability to type (or in general, to edit text) to be the bottleneck in getting things out of my brain and into a file. In these cases, Vim allows me to trade a bit of brainpower for efficiency in editing, which is great.
Other times, I'm being held up because I'm not sure what to type, but I prefer to do creative thinking away from the keyboard, so Vim is neither here nor there in those cases. So basically, the historical argument doesn't make sense for me; do you have any specific issues with Vim?
> Vim is the worst editor ... except all the other editors Yes to the first five words, no to the rest. How many Vim users realize that some of its more infuriating behaviors can be traced back to its predecessor vi, which had to be able operate with a "paper terminal", essentially a roll of paper as a display, without wasting too much paper during editing? And how do I know this? During my time at NASA designing par…
I am curious: have you used Vim much in the past few years? (Determine for yourself what "few" means here.)
In other words, it's vi with a few changes. I still can't navigate while typing, or delete while navigating, or search while deleting. As I tried to remember all those weird incantations that I last used in the mid 1970s, I felt as though I was in a time warp.
Guess why Apple Writer was so popular in 1979 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer), in spite of its many limitations? I wrote Apple Writer specifically to avoid the handicaps built into vi, which was the default editor in those times. After Apple Writer came out, people would write articles saying things like, "My God! With Apple Writer, you can read files, write files, type, navigate and search without having to change modes! How did Lutus do it?"
The answer is simple. Apple Writer wasn't so extraordinary, but I wasn't mentally crippled by the vi code base or method of operation, and I wasn't averse to exposing people to new ideas. But you know what? If I was told that people would still be using vi thirty-four years later, and boasting about its wonderfulness, I would have fallen down laughing.
Even pico and nano are easier to use, and they're desperately weak.
I shouldn't complain. Apple Writer made me a multimillionaire through the simple virtue of not being vi, and little else. I should thank you people.
1) Dump Janus, add the plugins you actually want 2) True 3) :set paste 4) Then wrap it in a function 5) I've always found ctrl-p to be snappy actually. You can replace the matcher with ag or similar > write the Vim configuration lines required to cause those files to be ignored. You have got to be kidding me. Write a small amount of config once per project? It's no more complex than adding things to a UI set wildigno…
> Vim is the worst editor ... except all the other editors Yes to the first five words, no to the rest. How many Vim users realize that some of its more infuriating behaviors can be traced back to its predecessor vi, which had to be able operate with a "paper terminal", essentially a roll of paper as a display, without wasting too much paper during editing? And how do I know this? During my time at NASA designing par…
I would actually love to hear some specific and insightful criticisms of Vim, but referring to its history is not a particularly compelling one (for me, at least). In today's terms, the above "without wasting too much paper during editing" argument translates into "with as few keystrokes as possible". In some situations, I definitely find my ability to type (or in general, to edit text) to be the bottleneck in gettin…
Sure, no problem:
* It's still a command-line editor. Just like vi.
* To perform multiple operations, like moving the cursor around, entering text, deleting text, searching the document, saving and loading files, requires you to switch modes. Just like vi.
* It cannot take advantage of the modern computing environment -- mouse navigation, different fonts, text styling, page layout, or anything else. Just like vi.
* No clipboard support -- all copying and pasting operations, apart from being another example of bizarre vi incantations requiring the recall of a raft of magic characters, is within vi/vim and disregards the system clipboard.
I can say this in vi/vim's favor: it's a step up from ed, its predecessor.
> In today's terms, the above "without wasting too much paper during editing" argument translates into "with as few keystrokes as possible".
No, actually, in the vi days, to save paper one had to enter more keystrokes, not fewer. When I wrote Apple Writer, former users of vi were astonished by how few keystrokes were required to accomplish things.
> do you have any specific issues with Vim?
Just one. It doesn't belong in modern times, it belongs in a museum.
1) Dump Janus, add the plugins you actually want 2) True 3) :set paste 4) Then wrap it in a function 5) I've always found ctrl-p to be snappy actually. You can replace the matcher with ag or similar > write the Vim configuration lines required to cause those files to be ignored. You have got to be kidding me. Write a small amount of config once per project? It's no more complex than adding things to a UI set wildigno…
But that's kinda the problem with vim. Having a sane configuration takes hours of setup and googling.
> Vim is the worst editor ... except all the other editors Yes to the first five words, no to the rest. How many Vim users realize that some of its more infuriating behaviors can be traced back to its predecessor vi, which had to be able operate with a "paper terminal", essentially a roll of paper as a display, without wasting too much paper during editing? And how do I know this? During my time at NASA designing par…
You seem to be an otherwise great guy with insightful comments and writings[1] that I occasionaly see on elsethreads. But as soon as a vim post hits the frontpage here you are to rehash the same authority fallacies, brag about having used and created this and that editor, and claim that what's in discussion here is as good as vi (which wasn't even extensible to begin with.) If you hated the little editor so much duri…
That's easy to answer -- as astonishing as it may sound, people are still using vim. Some of them might even think it's natural to have to use twice as many keystrokes as are required on a modern editor, even another command-line editor, to switch from editing to navigating (as just one example).
> I'm not sure who you're trying to save here, the bunch of us seem to be mostly happy with what is really the worst editor we can get except all the others.
Yes, except that that is false. Any meaningful comparison is so obviously against vim that I feel like I'm trying to dissuade True Believers from an irrational belief.
1) Dump Janus, add the plugins you actually want 2) True 3) :set paste 4) Then wrap it in a function 5) I've always found ctrl-p to be snappy actually. You can replace the matcher with ag or similar > write the Vim configuration lines required to cause those files to be ignored. You have got to be kidding me. Write a small amount of config once per project? It's no more complex than adding things to a UI set wildigno…