Vim for Humans • Hacker News Board

Re: Vim for Humans

#121

Post by Lio » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:03 PM UTC

gepoch wrote: post #91

Philipp__ wrote: post #68

It took me a while to realize what really vim is for. What led me to realization was switching to Emacs. I read this post, and second checkbox says "modern customizable IDE". And I stopped there. Why you may ask? Well, I used Vim for 3 years before trying Emacs this spring. And I loaded it with all the heavy plugins(YCM), but Emacs led me to realization that Vim is more of an editor than IDE. Even with plugins I thin…

I will add some of my own opinions: My feeling is that real value of Vim is its novel approach to modal text manipulation, and you shouldn't let the fact that it has a standalone lightweight reference implementation usefully installed on almost every machine that you use confuse you. Vim script is not a great plugin language, and the vim runtime itself is not fantastic at doing things beyond the text editing. I think…

> There are superior platforms that implement the same interface

I guess that depends on how well you know Vim.

All of the Vi/Vim plugins and emulators I've tried fell in the "uncanny valley" where they were only superficially like Vim but sooner or latter departed from the expected behaviour.

Re: Vim for Humans

#122

Post by BurningFrog » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:14 PM UTC

ancarda wrote: post #115

BurningFrog wrote: post #84

I continue to be baffled that software written 40+ years ago, to deal with constraints and realities that are long long gone keep being used by people on the cutting edge of technology change.

I don't use Vim because I have to due to limitations, I use it because it's a joy to use. What would you suggest people use instead?

I've been very happy with the IntelliJ, RubyMine, WebStorm family of IDEs.

They have similar UIs to all the other modern software I use, doesn't require a learning curve to start typing, and have tons of features the vi/emacs people don't miss because they don't know they exist.

I understand that it's hard for old timer to learn a new tool. I do not understand why they're still taught to beginner programmers.

Re: Vim for Humans

#123

Post by Lio » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:16 PM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #108

icc97 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started out like this. In effect in the beginning you can do everything in edit mode, you don't actually need the key bindings. Pretty much the only thing I learnt was 'dd' to delete a line (which actually just cuts the line). The other very simple thing is just typing '/' and then searching. It's much simpler and more natural once you're used to it than Ctrl+F. Then further searching is just hitting '/' again inst…

> beginning you can do everything in edit mode Can I make an alias for vim or emacs to keep me in edit mode at all times? That's one of the worst things about the editor. The other "Worst" thing in the editor for me is that it doesn't show the common shortcuts at the bottom like nano does. Is there a way to do this? Is there a plugin that observes all of the shortcuts you use and lists the most common ones at the bot…

Probably what you're looking for is gVim-easy which is installed along with gVim. It starts in inset mode and the menus give you some idea of the shortcuts available. gVim should also respond to OS shortcuts like C-c, C-v, etc.

http://supportweb.cs.bham.ac.uk/documentation/tutorials/docs...

Personally I would just run vimtutor in the terminal, watch vimcasts.org and then read the PragProg book.

Re: Vim for Humans

#124

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:16 PM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #108

icc97 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started out like this. In effect in the beginning you can do everything in edit mode, you don't actually need the key bindings. Pretty much the only thing I learnt was 'dd' to delete a line (which actually just cuts the line). The other very simple thing is just typing '/' and then searching. It's much simpler and more natural once you're used to it than Ctrl+F. Then further searching is just hitting '/' again inst…

> beginning you can do everything in edit mode Can I make an alias for vim or emacs to keep me in edit mode at all times? That's one of the worst things about the editor. The other "Worst" thing in the editor for me is that it doesn't show the common shortcuts at the bottom like nano does. Is there a way to do this? Is there a plugin that observes all of the shortcuts you use and lists the most common ones at the bot…

[deleted]

Re: Vim for Humans

#125

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:16 PM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #108

icc97 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started out like this. In effect in the beginning you can do everything in edit mode, you don't actually need the key bindings. Pretty much the only thing I learnt was 'dd' to delete a line (which actually just cuts the line). The other very simple thing is just typing '/' and then searching. It's much simpler and more natural once you're used to it than Ctrl+F. Then further searching is just hitting '/' again inst…

> beginning you can do everything in edit mode Can I make an alias for vim or emacs to keep me in edit mode at all times? That's one of the worst things about the editor. The other "Worst" thing in the editor for me is that it doesn't show the common shortcuts at the bottom like nano does. Is there a way to do this? Is there a plugin that observes all of the shortcuts you use and lists the most common ones at the bot…

[deleted]

Re: Vim for Humans

#126

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:16 PM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #108

icc97 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started out like this. In effect in the beginning you can do everything in edit mode, you don't actually need the key bindings. Pretty much the only thing I learnt was 'dd' to delete a line (which actually just cuts the line). The other very simple thing is just typing '/' and then searching. It's much simpler and more natural once you're used to it than Ctrl+F. Then further searching is just hitting '/' again inst…

> beginning you can do everything in edit mode Can I make an alias for vim or emacs to keep me in edit mode at all times? That's one of the worst things about the editor. The other "Worst" thing in the editor for me is that it doesn't show the common shortcuts at the bottom like nano does. Is there a way to do this? Is there a plugin that observes all of the shortcuts you use and lists the most common ones at the bot…

[deleted]

Re: Vim for Humans

#127

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:16 PM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #108

icc97 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started out like this. In effect in the beginning you can do everything in edit mode, you don't actually need the key bindings. Pretty much the only thing I learnt was 'dd' to delete a line (which actually just cuts the line). The other very simple thing is just typing '/' and then searching. It's much simpler and more natural once you're used to it than Ctrl+F. Then further searching is just hitting '/' again inst…

> beginning you can do everything in edit mode Can I make an alias for vim or emacs to keep me in edit mode at all times? That's one of the worst things about the editor. The other "Worst" thing in the editor for me is that it doesn't show the common shortcuts at the bottom like nano does. Is there a way to do this? Is there a plugin that observes all of the shortcuts you use and lists the most common ones at the bot…

[deleted]

Re: Vim for Humans

#128

Post by figgis » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:16 PM UTC

nicolashahn wrote: post #103

nol13 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you for nano, but what about compared to [graphical mouse-clicky editor of choice] (in non-vim mode)? I know enough of the basic vim commands that I could edit a file if I ever needed to but how much hand effort could it save me vs. kate or VS Code? (though i really prefer notepad++ to both of those) I feel relatively efficient in a good graphical editor but maybe I just don't know any better? Really just give…

There's a plugin (can't remember the name of it right now) that lets you use mouse controls as well. Click where you want the cursor, scroll, click on which tab you want, etc. That was game over with Sublime for me.

I don't think you need a plugin for that? set mouse=a, unless I am missing something

Re: Vim for Humans

#129

Post by gepoch » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:34 PM UTC

Lio wrote: post #121

gepoch wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will add some of my own opinions: My feeling is that real value of Vim is its novel approach to modal text manipulation, and you shouldn't let the fact that it has a standalone lightweight reference implementation usefully installed on almost every machine that you use confuse you. Vim script is not a great plugin language, and the vim runtime itself is not fantastic at doing things beyond the text editing. I think…

> There are superior platforms that implement the same interface I guess that depends on how well you know Vim. All of the Vi/Vim plugins and emulators I've tried fell in the "uncanny valley" where they were only superficially like Vim but sooner or latter departed from the expected behaviour.

Yeah, fair enough. That's a very good way of putting it, and I know exactly what you mean.

I think the hardest part about implementing the Vim keybindings is that they're intrinsically linked to the way that Vim models text and operations. Commands are really statements about this internal model. Without the model, it gets difficult to reproduce the full palette of vim commands with very high fidelity.

You kind of inevitably have to build your own vim-like text model to handle the keystrokes, and map it back into the platform that you're on (which is often a dumb buffer object for most text editors.) It's certainly much deeper than a keybinding. I called it an interface, but that's still not really deep enough.

Well, anyways maybe NeoVim is good after all.

Re: Vim for Humans

#130

Post by GrinningFool » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:34 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #58

clifanatic wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it depends on what you're doing. For example, if I want to duplicate a line in vi, I can type 'yyp' and _bam_: duplicate line. With a keyboard and a mouse, I have to reach over, select the whole line (being careful not to over or under select), hit Ctrl+C, move the cursor down to the beginning of the next line, and hit Ctrl+V. If I want to change the contents of a quoted string, I can type 'f"lct"' and start ty…

> With a keyboard and a mouse, I have to reach over, select the whole line (being careful not to over or under select), hit Ctrl+C, move the cursor down to the beginning of the next line, and hit Ctrl+V. Sure, but who does that? In any text editor on the Mac its: - Command-Left to move to the beginning of the line - Shift-Command-Right to select to the end of the line - Command-C to copy - Command-V to paste One anno…

        - [2] Command-Left to move to the beginning of the line
        - [3] Shift-Command-Right to select to the end of the line
        - [2] Command-C to copy
        - [2] Command-V to paste

Total keypresses: 9

Total keypresses for yyp: 3 (4 if you have to esc to normal mode first)

My point being that even the simple and straightforward actions you provided are more complex than they seem.