Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime • Hacker News Board

Re: Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime

#11

Post by mikorym » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 2:27 PM UTC

knolax wrote: post #7

travislane wrote: post #2

Two questions: With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? Is SLIME still the state of the art for Lisp development environment? Is there no way to get started with Lisp programming without having to learn Emacs or Vim?

> With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? That's such a weird dichotomy to present, what feature of Vim did other text editors lack that VS Code managed to replace? Vim is a "relevant skill" because it is a better editing paradigm. VS Code is no more competition to it than Nano or Emacs were.

Or PyCharm, or Eclipse, or ...

It like asking what do the cool kids code in? And happily, one prudent quora.com user answered: "Smalltalk!" [1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/Which-should-be-my-first-programming-l.... OK, not quite in my words. Also: looks like there is now a subscribe wall...

Re: Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime

#12

Post by pletnes » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

travislane wrote: post #2

Two questions: With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? Is SLIME still the state of the art for Lisp development environment? Is there no way to get started with Lisp programming without having to learn Emacs or Vim?

I use, or have used, vim bindings in vscode, visual studio on windows, etc etc.

Sometimes you run across large ascii files, e.g csv data files, and vim is the only editor that can open them.

Vim is available virtually everywhere you have a unix-resembling system, including gitbash on windows.

And sometimes you need to edit some config file in a weird environment over ssh and there’s nothing else present.

Oh, and macros can help with laborious file conversion processes. Etc.

Re: Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime

#13

Post by Aperocky » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 2:43 PM UTC

travislane wrote: post #2

Two questions: With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? Is SLIME still the state of the art for Lisp development environment? Is there no way to get started with Lisp programming without having to learn Emacs or Vim?

Vim is highly customizable, the one you get on most unix systems are engines and transmission only.

The engines and transmission are incredibly powerful, the only problems is you sit on top of metal with a stick as your wheel.

But you can turn all that into a fully working luxury car/truck/whatever you like by digging in and customizing it. In the age of "don't build the wheel", you can also do that by installing component that other people have built already.

Re: Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime

#14

Post by dcassett » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

IMHO a very well-written article with great attention to detail. I especially liked the section on paredit with its step-by-step explanation.

Re: Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime

#15

Post by abjKT26nO8 » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

knolax wrote: post #7

travislane wrote: post #2

Two questions: With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? Is SLIME still the state of the art for Lisp development environment? Is there no way to get started with Lisp programming without having to learn Emacs or Vim?

> With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? That's such a weird dichotomy to present, what feature of Vim did other text editors lack that VS Code managed to replace? Vim is a "relevant skill" because it is a better editing paradigm. VS Code is no more competition to it than Nano or Emacs were.

Disclaimer: I'm a long-time Vim user who can't stand editing text without the modal editing paradigm anymore.

Emacs is a competition to Vim, because it has a couple things that Vim does not have:

1. It can understand that a certain part of a file is written in one language and another in another language; and then give you appropriate syntax highlighting, indentation etc. in these specific parts. Vim can't do that.

2. It is an actual GUI application as opposed to GVim which is basically a terminal with vim and a toolbar. It (Emacs) can render proportional fonts, which is really nice when you edit org/LaTeX documents.

3. Its scripting language is a lot nicer to work with.

For these reasons, whenever I can, I use Emacs with evil-mode. For the occasional editing of a file on a server or an embedded device I will still fire up vim (or vi in the latter case, since then vim will usually not be available). I encourage you to try it.

Re: Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime

#16

Post by F-0X » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

travislane wrote: post #2

Two questions: With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? Is SLIME still the state of the art for Lisp development environment? Is there no way to get started with Lisp programming without having to learn Emacs or Vim?

Here's one maybe-reason and one definitely-reason VSCode cannot replace vim for me:

1) Logs are often compressed. Can VSCode open .gz files? Vim behaves pleasingly unixy: 'zcat logs.gz | vim -' opens the file pretty quickly in vim. No fuss with explicit de/recompression. This also ties in to the usual "but ssh" argument, since of course you're likely to be getting logs on remote machines.

2) Bash pipelines are usually an iterative affair. It has some tricks in place to mitigate the issues of very long commands. C-x C-e will open vim to allow you to enter a command, and fc will open vim with the previously executed command already there (short for fix command).

Lastly, vim has an expansive collections of extensions. So much so that if vim is ever "not enough", then neither is VSCode, and I should just use a full IDE.

Re: Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime

#17

Post by aidenn0 » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 3:22 PM UTC

travislane wrote: post #2

Two questions: With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? Is SLIME still the state of the art for Lisp development environment? Is there no way to get started with Lisp programming without having to learn Emacs or Vim?

SLIME has a successor now called Sly, but yes that's still state of the art for Lisp programming.

No, you don't have to learn emacs to get started with Lisp though. You'll just have an inferior experience.

As a side note, if you do start to learn without emacs, please use something like this[1] for formatting your code. Most editors lack a Lisp indentation plugin, and any time you ask a question online, whomever answers it will have to reformat otherwise.

1: https://github.com/ds26gte/scmindent (it's even in npm)

Re: Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime

#18

Post by lancebeet » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 3:56 PM UTC

I wonder why the author doesn't mention the plugin vim-slime[1], given that it seems to be more popular than either Slimv or Vlime on github. From what I can gather, Slimv and Vlime are more focused on lisp with built-in completion and debugging whereas vim-slime is language agnostic and simply recreates just the "connected REPL" behavior of Slime.

[1] https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime

Re: Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime

#19

Post by harryposner » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

F-0X wrote: post #16

travislane wrote: post #2

Two questions: With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? Is SLIME still the state of the art for Lisp development environment? Is there no way to get started with Lisp programming without having to learn Emacs or Vim?

Here's one maybe-reason and one definitely-reason VSCode cannot replace vim for me: 1) Logs are often compressed. Can VSCode open .gz files? Vim behaves pleasingly unixy: 'zcat logs.gz | vim -' opens the file pretty quickly in vim. No fuss with explicit de/recompression. This also ties in to the usual "but ssh" argument, since of course you're likely to be getting logs on remote machines. 2) Bash pipelines are usuall…

A slight correction: C-x C-e and fc open $EDITOR, which is vim by default on most machines. You can change it to anything, though.

Re: Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime

#20

Post by Zelphyr » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

travislane wrote: post #2

Two questions: With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? Is SLIME still the state of the art for Lisp development environment? Is there no way to get started with Lisp programming without having to learn Emacs or Vim?

The answer to your first question is: Yes.

As you say, there are some really great editors like VS Code available these days and I have used many, if not most of them but I keep coming back to Vim. The reason is that I feel so much more productive in it. I can do things with three simple keystrokes that are quite a bit more involved in other editors. And that’s pure, stock Vim without any plugins. It’s astounding what I can accomplish with the addition of some plugins.

Really, in the end, it’s just another tool that fits me well. It may not fit you as well and that’s ok. But there is definitely still a place for old-school editors like Vim and Emacs in a modern developer’s toolkit.

As an aside; I don’t know why OP was downvoted so heavily. There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking a question such as this. I have to account for the possibility that it was edited to be less caustic by the time I read it but, if that wasn’t the case, I think all who downvoted it should re-evaluate their decision to do so. We should celebrate the desire to understand something and, from what I can see, that’s all this person is trying to do.