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Just Use Sublime Text

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Re: Just Use Sublime Text

#101

Post by wonderzombie »

bphogan wrote: post #28
sergiotapia wrote: post #2

Refreshing to see this after all the Vim gospel programmers out there claiming it's benefits. I do have to say though, I've seen some videos of real Vim pros at work and it's -majestic- how swiftly they move through lines and duplicating lines, editing params, refactoring, etc - a thing of beauty akin to watching videos on /r/artisanvideos[0]. I'll stick to Sublime Text and Nano when I need some ssh terminal editing.…

Our industry works this way and I don't understand why programmers who are always "using the right tool" call anything new that they disagree with "gospel" or "evangelizing." SublimeText isn't that old. Somehow you found out about it, learned its keyboard shortcuts, found out what plugins to install to do your work, and made it your editor. That's how I learned Vim. I'll admit that I have a bias, and that learning to…

You're mostly right re: knowledge transfer, although it's really as simple as you imply.

First, Vim emulation widgets vary a great deal in quality, supporting different, disjoint subsets of Vim functionality. Just as an example, ideaVim doesn't support Ctrl-W for navigating between panes. The deeper your knowledge of Vim, the more diminishing returns you get.

Second, Sublime Text's Vintage mode supports enough of my Vim workflow that it's actually made me faster with Vim and other Vim emulation widgets. To the extent that any Vim emulation mode overlaps with Vim, I have improved across the board. Of course this is true mostly for the less deep features IME.

Re: Just Use Sublime Text

#102

Post by taternuts »

aschampion wrote: post #18

Or just use vim in Sublime Text through vintage mode or the vintageous plugin. I use mouse navigation plenty when browsing code, but a mouse is never going to be as effective at routine tasks like changing text inside a matching bracket, switching case, etc., none of which require dealing with vim plugins. Sure, all those things can be done through an IDE like ST without vi bindings, but only by memorizing even stran…

Yeah I came in to say using vintage mode + VintageEx is fantastic and what I spend 80% of my time developing in.

Re: Just Use Sublime Text

#103

Post by f15h »

tedunangst wrote: post #34

Yikes. I've been trying to use vim without plugins for 15 years. I'm glad somebody told me it's unusable, otherwise I may not have noticed.

Same here, 15 years. If it wasn't for this article I would have not noticed as well.

Re: Just Use Sublime Text

#104

Post by bphogan »

yen223 wrote: post #57
bphogan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our industry works this way and I don't understand why programmers who are always "using the right tool" call anything new that they disagree with "gospel" or "evangelizing." SublimeText isn't that old. Somehow you found out about it, learned its keyboard shortcuts, found out what plugins to install to do your work, and made it your editor. That's how I learned Vim. I'll admit that I have a bias, and that learning to…

The Sublime Text knowledge I have is pretty esoteric, I admit. You have to learn weird key combos like Cmd-C to copy text into a register (or a "clipboard", to use ST's unusual terminology), and Cmd-V to "paste" it. I have no idea which other software uses those shortcut combos.

I'm referring to the many, many ST things I mentioned in my posts. Copy and paste is trivial and I'm sure you're aware of what I was referring to.

Re: Just Use Sublime Text

#105

Post by johncoltrane »

vertex-four wrote: post #74
johncoltrane wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue, really, is that most Vimmers, including its core devs, don't care about all the gimmicky features you list.

They're not gimmicky. I depend on them every day, either for learning or for regular use, just like vimmers depend on the weird ability to build up ridiculously complex commands. You may as well call user interfaces aside from the shell prompt a gimmick altogether.

You depend on them everyday but most people don't and nobody cares about that because nobody is trying to force you to use Vim or even change your perspective about it. Some retarded bloggers, on the other hand, like to use their lack of patience/knowledge/willingness to learn as a proof that Vim sucks. Well… they don't really serve their goal, do they?

> vim is stuck in terminal land

For people who use a terminal it's not a problem at all.

> It can't have easily navigable GUI menus

I suppose MacVim and GVim don't count. Vimmers usually don't use menus, though.

> it can't really have overlays

And we don't want that gimmick.

> it can't have a minimap

And we don't want that one either.

> it can't have differently sized text

Same.

> It doesn't even have autocomplete for its commands, at least out of the box, which would make it significantly more usable without disappearing into help files every time I want to do something I don't do often.

It has tab-completion, though.

> Add on to that its awful configuration language

    set showmode
is awful? Oh yes, JSON… the answer to every damn problem on earth.

> and the fact that it's not really usable out of the box unlike Sublime Text, it's easy to see why some people consider it unmodern and, for them, inferior.

To be honest, if Sublime Text had been available for Mac OS X and Linux when I was looking for a cross-platform TextMate alternative I would have switched to it in a heartbeat. But I chose vim out of a very large pool of editors/IDEs and, frankly, using anything else is now a PITA.

I'm actually quite comfortable with Vim's perceived learning curve: it keeps the most superficial users out of our ecosystem.

Re: Just Use Sublime Text

#106

Post by zaqokm »

As a person who is hovering between a tmux+vim setup and rubymine, I find vim rather convoluted. I was hoping vim was going to be my goto editor, as I was looking for something which was multiplatform, and was a polygot platform ( the one thing I really do not like rubymine for).

Maybe it is just me but the idea of having to go from one mode to the other to use the standard navigation keys seems like a strange thing to do. Having to hit ESC (now I have CAPSLOCK remapped) also seems rather inefficient. On top of that having to find the right plugin to install also drove me nuts, then no intuitive short cut keys and normal vs visual mode again.

Now I did like vim because it was a console app, and with tmux I could run many terminal windows in the same session. I just do not know if vim is right for me or I haven't spent the 10,000 hours mastering it yet. I am sure I will get there with more practice.

:wq

Re: Just Use Sublime Text

#107

Post by DrinkWater »

I am a vim user and i don't understand how people always exaggerate on the learning curve of vim. Coming from a group of people that is probably the most arrogant and stuck-up group of professionals. "We are amongst the smartest people on earth", "Let's disrupt everything", "lifetime learning...", etc.

However, learning new keybindings and a bit of philiosophy seems to be too much.

Go on, downvote me. I dont't care, like bitch, i :q! you!

Re: Just Use Sublime Text

#108

Post by DanBC »

DrinkWater wrote: post #107

I am a vim user and i don't understand how people always exaggerate on the learning curve of vim. Coming from a group of people that is probably the most arrogant and stuck-up group of professionals. "We are amongst the smartest people on earth", "Let's disrupt everything", "lifetime learning...", etc. However, learning new keybindings and a bit of philiosophy seems to be too much. Go on, downvote me. I dont't care,…

Programmers are programming now, today.

That's why they don't change keyboard layouts even though a different layout is probably more comfortable; it's why they don't change to VIM even though it's so powerful.

What they have is good enough for most of the time.

Perhaps universities should be teachin VIM and emacs?

It's not like the days when secretaries would be taught WordPerfect at colleges and thus WP could get away with a blank blue screen.

Re: Just Use Sublime Text

#109

Post by vladharbuz »

Tloewald wrote: post #69

I've been coding for a long time. I started on ijkm (Apple II) and editors that make vim look modern (when I was in college the congnoscenti tried to get the CS department to provide sed, and eventually implemented their own version and passed it around), and I've always regarded the vim/emacs crowd as amusingly deluded. While there are some great tricks you can do with magic incantations in vim/emacs, you can do muc…

> you can do much more far more easily in notepad with a mouse/trackpad

This is just completely bogus. If you think about how large a terminal window is, on average, you have a grid of (e.g.) 100x50. That means you're trying to click one out of 5,000 symbols (for example the start of a word), which are very tiny. If you then think about this in terms of Fitts's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law), you can see how clicking one tiny character with a tiny mouse on a large screen isn't the easiest thing.

Compare that to using your keyboard. For instance, if you're looking for the word "pipe", typing this in vim:

  /pipe
Is obviously much faster. I don't see how anyone could believe that using a mouse is more efficient for such tasks.

Re: Just Use Sublime Text

#110

Post by sergiotapia »

johncoltrane wrote: post #105
vertex-four wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not gimmicky. I depend on them every day, either for learning or for regular use, just like vimmers depend on the weird ability to build up ridiculously complex commands. You may as well call user interfaces aside from the shell prompt a gimmick altogether.

You depend on them everyday but most people don't and nobody cares about that because nobody is trying to force you to use Vim or even change your perspective about it. Some retarded bloggers, on the other hand, like to use their lack of patience/knowledge/willingness to learn as a proof that Vim sucks. Well… they don't really serve their goal, do they? > vim is stuck in terminal land For people who use a terminal it…

>I'm actually quite comfortable with Vim's perceived learning curve: it keeps the most superficial users out of our ecosystem.

Literally the dumbest thing I've read on HackerNews. https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says material.

Why would you even care who uses what or belongs to your 'ecosystem'? What?!

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