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Why I teach vim

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Re: Why I teach vim

#101

Post by derwiki »

cutler wrote: post #74
beny23 wrote: post #65

The ability to efficiently navigate and edit files while SSH’d into an instance is a very useful skill. You just wouldn’t have the permissions to install your favourite editor and vi is almost everywhere. I had to learn vi when working on green screen terminals logged into HP/UX and there was no alternative but am very glad I did as I find that nothing as ubiquitous allows me to efficiently change files. Does that me…

Why the dichotomy? IDEA Vim is an excellent IntelliJ plugin. For XCode there's XVim2 and Visual Studio has VisualVim. In fact the pervasiveness of good Vim plugins for ide's is one of the factors in Vim's lead over Emacs.

There’s a decent VS Code plug-in as well

Re: Why I teach vim

#102

Post by bitcoinmoney »

tomhoward wrote: post #97

I'm a Vi/Vim user since 2000, when I started transitioning from my ISP junior tech support job into a corporate support/sysadmin job. Vi was what everyone used, so that's what I was taught. I was just shown the basic 5-10 key commands, then I was on my own. Life got a whole lot easier when I invested about $15 in a Vi cheat sheet coffee mug. Never looked back.

Link to the cheat sheet and coffee mug?

Re: Why I teach vim

#103

Post by hyperpallium2 »

fergie wrote: post #8

"I wish I could say I agonized over all the options at the time and decided vim was the best pedagogical solution, but the reality of the situation was that vi was what I used in college because my father taught me vi" We dont talk about this much, but many of us hardcore Vi/Emacs users have had this knowledge imparted to us from a mentor. Thats probably why the use of Vi/Emacs is much higher in established tech envi…

vim as initiation ceremony - a near-death experience where the initiate is reborn as a member of an arcane sorcery guild.

Re: Why I teach vim

#104

Post by alvarosevilla95 »

greggman3 wrote: post #100
gtsop wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc, in that its a personal choice that some are public about. This is not a good theory. Surely, this effect appears wherever you've got conflicting choices about what is best, but there are always reasonable arguments on why you should do X over Y. And you know, there are always people who respect other's choices. I am a vim user and I 100% understa…

I am curious if any vim user has ever been able to see the benefits of other environments. I know I have never been able to see the benefits of vim. Part of me wants to give a try for 3-6 months just to prove to myself that it's all bullshit and that vim is just another editor. In any case. For a long time I was a fan of my editor of choice, slickedit. It definitely has a few features I use for which I don't know the…

You should read about the language server protocol. As it continues to become the standard vim will match most IDE-specific features while keeping all the benefits of using vim, which if you can't see I won't bother listing here. I'm already working on java 100% from vim and I don't miss a thing from intellij

Re: Why I teach vim

#105

Post by swiley »

fergie wrote: post #8

"I wish I could say I agonized over all the options at the time and decided vim was the best pedagogical solution, but the reality of the situation was that vi was what I used in college because my father taught me vi" We dont talk about this much, but many of us hardcore Vi/Emacs users have had this knowledge imparted to us from a mentor. Thats probably why the use of Vi/Emacs is much higher in established tech envi…

IME almost everyone who's "self taught" started with some kind of mentor.

Re: Why I teach vim

#106

Post by 0x445442 »

hiperlink wrote: post #87
blackrock wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Windows, use Bitvise. SSH into your Linux box. Use the file browser GUI to navigate to your file. Edit it in Sublime, or your favorite editor. Vi is ok for viewing files on a terminal, and for small edits, but it’s rather mediocre for any significant amount of development work.

> Vi is ok for viewing files on a terminal, and for small edits, but it’s rather mediocre for any significant amount of development work. May I ask what prove this?

One of the statements I see a lot is that mouseless, keyboard only HCI is faster. But as far as I know, to the extent that any real studies have been done at all, this assertion is false.

I don't have the references at hand but I think people like Alan Kay and designers at Apple would think it crazy to even suggest that a keyboard only HCI is more efficient.

Re: Why I teach vim

#107

Post by dbrueck »

jdrek1 wrote: post #56
pvg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really the same thing, compared to vi[m], emacs is statistically dead. And there are already lots of people who're well into their careers in academia and industry who aren't users of either. My own contrarian and probably equally wrong take is that it's mostly about accepting the (evidence-free) premise that modal editing is actually a good thing. It's hard, you suffer but lots of smart people tell you i…

I don't think your take is wrong. I have yet to see any actual argument from the vim/emacs crowd. I'm genuinely curious about what makes them defend their editor choice that heavily but whenever I ask them for their reasons all I get is a "modal editing is great because modal editing is great". I can somewhat understand "don't have to touch the mouse" as that's a personal preference for them (even though IDEs have ke…

I think editor choice is pretty subjective, but for me it's two main things:

1) Editing speed. I'm far from a Vim power user, but anytime I have to use a different editor, I'm frustrated by how slow and cumbersome it is to edit code. It feels like trying to run in water.

2) Ubiquity. It's so nice to just use the same editor everywhere, especially remotely and/or on low-powered devices.

On point #1: This is not just an issue of familiarity either; I've used way too many editors over the years, vim wasn't my first choice, and I resisted it for a long time. Once I bit the bullet (due to point #2, above), I found that the learning curve was really steep as expected. But an interesting thing happened soon after that: long before I felt proficient in Vim, the speed of editing files in Vim surpassed the speed of making the same changes in any other editor.

Re: Why I teach vim

#108

Post by elygre »

bitcoinmoney wrote: post #102
tomhoward wrote: post #97

I'm a Vi/Vim user since 2000, when I started transitioning from my ISP junior tech support job into a corporate support/sysadmin job. Vi was what everyone used, so that's what I was taught. I was just shown the basic 5-10 key commands, then I was on my own. Life got a whole lot easier when I invested about $15 in a Vi cheat sheet coffee mug. Never looked back.

Link to the cheat sheet and coffee mug?

Googling for “vim coffee mug” provides reasonable hits.

Re: Why I teach vim

#109

Post by theonemind »

greggman3 wrote: post #100
gtsop wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc, in that its a personal choice that some are public about. This is not a good theory. Surely, this effect appears wherever you've got conflicting choices about what is best, but there are always reasonable arguments on why you should do X over Y. And you know, there are always people who respect other's choices. I am a vim user and I 100% understa…

I am curious if any vim user has ever been able to see the benefits of other environments. I know I have never been able to see the benefits of vim. Part of me wants to give a try for 3-6 months just to prove to myself that it's all bullshit and that vim is just another editor. In any case. For a long time I was a fan of my editor of choice, slickedit. It definitely has a few features I use for which I don't know the…

I got pretty good with vim. I'd say it was the fastest I could ever edit text. It really can be insanely fast for editing text but ultimately, I don't like vim. I don't spend that much time literally editing text, like a copy editor. I spend much more time typing and thinking, and very little editing.

I can touch type both QWERTY and Dvorak. I usually type Dvorak, and the longer I type QWERTY, the more I get this mental fatigue of continually overriding what my fingers wanted to do. Using vim gives me a tinge of that feeling, that I wouldn't recognize as a hint of that feeling if I didn't know how the bigger version of the feeling feels after a day of typing QWERTY. It has something to do with the impedance mismatch of hitting keys in the wrong mode/forgetting what mode you're in (humans are terrible at moded interfaces) and throwing around a minilanguage for text editing in my head besides the actual task I need to do.

Saving 2 or 3 minutes of text editing a day isn't worth the aggravation.

I would say you can feel like you have a godlike sense of power over the text, like you're playing Age of Empires. Some people probably like that, and equate it with productivity and time-savings. It's optimizing for the wrong thing.

Re: Why I teach vim

#110

Post by alblue »

monkeycantype wrote: post #80
apocolyps6 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I guess that is it. The existence of the vegan is a moral judgement of everyone else's food choices, so they get hate. The existence of the vim user reminds you of that one time you gave it a shot and it didn't stick, so it makes you feel attacked the same way.

I want to say one thing in defence of vegans, you only know about the vegans who tell you they are vegans. These people are actually the people-who-like-to-tell-you-they-are-vegans. There a lot of vegans who don't eat animal products and just leave it at that. Like my partner who just cooked me an anchovy pizza. You never hear about the just-a-vegan-and-god-knows-why-you'd-want-to-tell-everyone, because they creep th…

But anchovy is a fish ... how is that not eating animals?
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