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Big Pile of Vim-Like

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Re: Big Pile of Vim-Like

#101
post #5

Vim is a nice operating system. If it only had an easy way to shutdown...

Vim is more of a concept in human computer interaction. Most of the software in the linked page share zero LOC with vim. But they share keybindings, modalness and a general way of interacting. Sort of the inverse of Emacs.

How's it "inverse" of Emacs?

Vim is a powerful idea that has many implementations.

Emacs is an environment to run emacs-lisp, a language based on another powerful idea - Lisp.

People unfamiliar with Vim philosophy often scoff: "Why do you need to control everything with h/j/k/l. Why all this modality crap?" And the answer is: Because it gives you incredible control over the text. You'd feel empowered. And text to us humans is everything, especially us: software developers, writers, etc. We live text, and we breathe text, we stare at it all day long, we type it, we manipulate it. And if there's a proven method to make it even just a bit slightly better, how stubborn and stupid one has to be not to give it a try?

People unfamiliar with Emacs often scoff: "Why do you need to run everything in Emacs?". And the answer is simple: Because it gives you incredible control over things beyond the text. Everything is connected. I can schedule my work, and I can track my time spent on it, I can take notes without leaving the context of my work. I can jump into the file manager and edit filenames like it's just text, and then submit my changes - it will do it for all the files. I can select multiple files and see the git-log of modifications to those files. I can submit my changes and update the status of the ticket in the bug-tracking system without leaving the context I'm in. When someone sends me an email, I can link that email to the item in my Org-agenda. And everything is so flexible, and even when you need to switch between projects and have to re-configure things you don't have to restart things, you don't have to change the context, you stay "in the zone." You'd feel empowered.

People often debate what's better Vim or Emacs, often without even having the slightest understanding of what each of them has to offer.

Re: Big Pile of Vim-Like

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks bloated and isn't open source

They announced to open source with an 18 month time delay (MIT license) https://github.com/onivim/oni2-mit

But I don't have to wait 18 months for new releases of Vim or NeoVim.

Re: Big Pile of Vim-Like

#103
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, do you use Linux as your main desktop OS?

That's right. I have been using Debian GNU/Linux as my main laptop OS for about 13 years now. I used to have GNOME 2 desktop environment earlier but once GNOME 3 became the default, I switched to Xfce Desktop Environment. The fact that the Debian project still offers a CD image[1] with Xfce bundled as the default desktop environment is really nice. Having said that, I have to confess that these days I also use macOS…

The reason I ask is that Firefox is honestly poorly supported on Linux and you lose hardware video decoding, so watching videos in the browser causes horrendous performance. However, it is supported by Chromium and patched in many distros to work properly. I'm using Sway WM btw and run Arch so I get the latest stable releases of pretty much everything.

Re: Big Pile of Vim-Like

#104
post #20

"Vim modes" only offer like 40%-60% coverage of features in IDEs. I haven't found one yet that lets you set marks with :k[letter]. Jetbrains (and maybe viper) are the only ones I've found that support block modes. "Vim mode" means a lot more than just using 'hjklioaD^['. It would be fairer to call them "nvi modes".

The VSCode Vim plugin supports block mode, but it's a bit buggy at times

Re: Big Pile of Vim-Like

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here - I used qutebrowser exclusively for a couple months, but in the end I couldn't handle all the annoying popups and autoplaying videos in modern websites - all things that you can block with a single plugin in Firefox, together with ads. Too bad, because Vim plugins never allow full UI control in Firefox(e.g. closing an empty "new tab" is impossible with Vim plugins). Recently I switched from Vimium to Surfi…

I get around this with qutebrowser by whitelisting JavaScript.

How do you do that on a per-domain basis?

I suppose looking at javascript sources and whitelisting by domain isn't impossible with the UI tools available in Qute but I don't think anything like that currently exists (I've looked around a little).

Still a real ad-blocker would be great, youtube is barely usable these days with three layers of unskippable ads on each video. (although you can work around that /specific/ problem with umpv and a hotkey to launch it: section10 https://qutebrowser.org/FAQ.html )

Re: Big Pile of Vim-Like

#106
Something that has made me really appreciate Vim commands is "less"... yeah i'm talking about the seemingly simple pager that's already installed on your system - I could never get into vim for coding, but I always felt like it shined in places like less where you are consuming text rather than creating it.

Re: Big Pile of Vim-Like

#107
post #11

In the graphical browser category, I have tried Qutebrowser and it is neat. However, Firefox remains as my primary web browser. I use the Vimium plugin with Firefox. It provides Vim-like key bindings for many commonly used browsing tasks. My most favourite commands in Vimum are 'f' and 'F'. The 'f' or 'F' command creates key combinations for all the links found in the page. It highlights the key combinations in littl…

To add onto your excellent comment: Another lifesaver for me is the 'gi' command, which focuses your cursor on the first text input. Saves a lot of mouse movements. For me personally the browser was the last application in which I had to use the mouse, vimium solved that. Sounds like a mundane application but after a serious hand injury it made the difference to me for working 4 hours with mouse and being in pain, or…

With correct tab indices, pressing the tab key should do this, AFAIK.

Re: Big Pile of Vim-Like

#108
post #11

In the graphical browser category, I have tried Qutebrowser and it is neat. However, Firefox remains as my primary web browser. I use the Vimium plugin with Firefox. It provides Vim-like key bindings for many commonly used browsing tasks. My most favourite commands in Vimum are 'f' and 'F'. The 'f' or 'F' command creates key combinations for all the links found in the page. It highlights the key combinations in littl…

Ever since I started using vimium, it's become a need for me. It's the reason I don't use safari despite its better performance on a macbook. Weirdly enough, none of the people I've tried to convince to use it has stuck with it - all very tech literate people.

There's Vimari [1] which works well enough.

[1] https://github.com/televator-apps/vimari

Re: Big Pile of Vim-Like

#110
post #24

Why isn't the vi editor in there? It's at least as "vim-like" as bash or tmux.

Vi isn't Vim-like. Vim is Vi-like.

All of the listed apps have a subset of vim's functions. So does vi.

You use the listed apps because you wish you were in vim, sort of.

When you log in to a strange or bare system and need to edit, you wish you had vim. But at least you'll have vi, almost as good.

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