Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?
#2Awesome! I've been using vi for about 14 years now and am still learning new shortcuts and ways to harness the power of vi.
I love vi for its combined power and simplicity. It is installed by default on almost every terminal I've ever walked up to, all flavors of nix, BSD, HP-UX, etc. seem to come happily installed with vi ready to go.
Re: Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?
#3Someone should tell them that their "VI Gang Sign" is a pretty close analogue of the Shocker. (Not that that couldn't be a convincing argument to learn vi...)
Re: Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?
#4Being a dedicated emacs user, I could only shake my head and sigh as I read this.
Re: Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?
#5Awesome! I've been using vi for about 14 years now and am still learning new shortcuts and ways to harness the power of vi. I love vi for its combined power and simplicity. It is installed by default on almost every terminal I've ever walked up to, all flavors of nix, BSD, HP-UX, etc. seem to come happily installed with vi ready to go.
Man, I agree with the notion of power, but I simply cannot see how anyone could call it simple. The array of keystrokes and their combined meanings is not anywhere near simple, in my opinion.
That said, I would really like to sit down and learn vi sometime.
Re: Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?
#6hjkl motion is retarded on anything but a qwerty layout :/
Re: Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?
#7Awesome! I've been using vi for about 14 years now and am still learning new shortcuts and ways to harness the power of vi. I love vi for its combined power and simplicity. It is installed by default on almost every terminal I've ever walked up to, all flavors of nix, BSD, HP-UX, etc. seem to come happily installed with vi ready to go.
Man, I agree with the notion of power, but I simply cannot see how anyone could call it simple. The array of keystrokes and their combined meanings is not anywhere near simple, in my opinion. That said, I would really like to sit down and learn vi sometime.
about the longest 'combos' you make are action-move combos, which is 2 keys, and both the actions and move keys do things by themselves. 'w' for example moves to the beginning of the next word. it's a common travel key. 'dd' deletes the current line and is also commonly used. combine them into 'dw' and you delete everything up to the front of next word
so you preface any motion command with an action and you get the intended effect. it's a lot more intuitive than it may look at first. a combo i use a lot is 'cw', which replaces the current word. but when programming this is equivalent to "replace variable." it's things like that (see the 'smart ranges' topic on that link) that make it feel like you're more directly connected with the code, rather than editing it through an interface
Re: Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?
#8hjkl motion is retarded on anything but a qwerty layout :/
i use vi with Dvorak without any key remappings. it did take some getting used to at first when switching, but probably less getting used to than it took when i was first learning it on qwerty
also, hjkl aren't used often. you don't usually have to alter just one character in a word for example. the movement commands i use the most are (by far) 'w' and 'b' (next/previous word)
Re: Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?
#9Confession: I use vi because when I was learning how to be a sysadmin (was already a coder) it was recommended -- back then (the '90s) you never knew if emacs was going to be on a system, but vi was practically guaranteed.
I still barely know how to use it, though: my own fault. Laziness prevails. Some of the commands I use because I discovered them by accident (shift-C erases the rest of the line and puts you into edit mode -- I figured that one out because of a typo).
Re: Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?
#10My experience with vim started when I got OS X. I had always wanted to learn how to use the terminal on a UNIX machine, and as an extension of that want, I learned to use vim as it was very easy to jump right into it from the terminal.
If there was one word that I could use to describe vim, I would have to say: beautiful.