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Coming Home to Vim

stevelosh.com

121–125 of 125 posts

Re: Coming Home to Vim

#121

After a few months of vim use, I did part of the vim tutorial using both vim and a click-and-type editor (gedit) and timed myself. Gedit was significantly faster. Can't say I understand you vim fanatics.

I don't know how you are working and what your typing characteristics are, but you are probably not doing a lot of fast typing. Once you type reasonably fast (>30wpm), the time you have to invest to reach for the mouse, do some funky things and home back in to the keyboard is quite significant. Another thing is, that once you got some of the very useful commands into your bone, like repeat action, some of the more el…

typeracer.com says I type around 80 wpm, and I get quite nervous when I'm taking any sort of typing test, so I suspect my real typing speed is much higher. I'm on a laptop. Reaching for my mouse is very natural.

I do generally use vim for editing over ssh, although since I am root on the machines I work with, I would configure Gedit to work over ssh if I did any serious remote editing.

Re: Coming Home to Vim

#122
post #36

Great read. Among other things it made me dig deep into the heart of my Vista machine and find whatever font was making your site (and others) utterly unreadable. The answer is shitty Palatino fonts installed by HP, presumably as part of a printer driver. So there you go, if Steve's site makes your eyes bleed then go and kill the HP Palatino fonts on your machine.

Hmm, perhaps I should change the font stack. Is your shitty HP font named "Palatino" or "Palatino Linotype"? If it's "Palatino" I'll need to insert a Windows-only font at the front of the list. If it's "Palatino Linotype" I'll need to insert a Windows-only font as the second element in the list.

Hi Steve - it's "Palatino". I also have "Palatino Linotype" and it looks fine now that I've knocked off Palatino.

It's a problem I've come across previously on Windows, I think Sun's Java was also installing some horrible version of Palatino a while back. Pity, as it's a wonderful typeface and looks nice on your site.

Re: Coming Home to Vim

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you say why Gedit was faster perhaps us vim fanatics can help you understand us.

Apple discovered fairly early on that while using a keyboard shortcut seems faster, using the mouse is almost always quicker, even for very advanced users. The illusion stems from how we perceive time when performing the different tasks - we remember time spent searching for the correct target to click, but we forget time spent remembering the right incantation. This paradox is one of the big reasons why I don't use…

I agree that this is true in some cases but I can give you a counter example that really showed me how convenient vim is: ciw. 'ciw' erases the word under the cursor and allows you to retype it. This process is very, very slow using the mouse: even if double or triple click tends to correctly highlight the word you want to replace, positioning your mouse there is pretty slow.

Re: Coming Home to Vim

#125
I can't get snipMate to work. Downloaded a brand-new gVim (windows 64, btw) dropped a pathogen.vim file straight from github into my vimfiles/autoload folder and copied the snipMate's files to vimfiles/bundle/snipMate.vim

I'm using the article's _vimrc.

:scriptnames lists the "plugin/snipMate.vim" files from both the "snipmate.vim/" and "snipmate.vim/after"

But when I type some snippet (like a "for" in a *.c file) and press tab, a single space (not a tab) is inserted. Pressing tabs on non-snippets inserts a tab like expected.

Am I missing something here?

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