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Vim for Humans

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Re: Vim for Humans

#131

Post by chainsaw10 »

vadskye wrote: post #101
masukomi wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hjkl (not jkl;) are a) ergonomically bad because they are one key off of home row position and b) completely useless for anyone who types with a different keyboard such as Dvorak, and presumably some foreign language ones. also, HJKL actually IS the arrow keys... but it's the arrow keys from an ancient computer that no longer exists. People get all uppity about it being the "right" way but there's no logical argument…

Completely agree. Personally, I'm trying to spread the One True Way of ijkl navigation, but it's slow going...

I'm curious: what do you use to enter insert mode then?

Re: Vim for Humans

#132

Post by Lio »

BurningFrog wrote: post #122
ancarda wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What features do you think we're missing from WebStorm?

I've used WebStorm quite a bit in an old job where it's use was mandated by management.

What I found was that lots the headline features didn't work for the hairy old JavaScript codebase and certainly didn't work as well as Tern + ctags.

E.g. navigating to method definitions fell back to a simple search when dealing with react.js modules. As did refactorings such as rename (provided by Tern).

Gulp/webpack/grunt do a better job at workflow tasks IMHO too.

I guess there was the debugger but it's not a patch on Chrome's debugger so why use it?

Re: Vim for Humans

#133

Post by justinmk »

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…

> NeoVim seems like a bit of a waste to me, because I think it misses the point. Vim is not a platform.

Neovim is designed to be hosted (embedded). Embedding Neovim in a IDE (platform) allows Neovim to be the editor while exposing the IDE as "the platform".

It's also a guiding principle of Neovim to not dictate what applications are built with it, so yes, you can leverage its API as a platform. But that's not the singular purpose.

> I guess what I mean is that vim should be left as vim. There are superior platforms that implement the same interface,

There are no applications that implement Vim (except Neovim, which passes Vim's test suite).

Re: Vim for Humans

#135

Post by bgribble »

ifoundthetao wrote: post #16
gravypod wrote: post #10

I wish I could use vim or emacs. I don't know if I'm stupid or something but all of the key bindings, everything you have to remember, it just doesn't make sense to me. I wish there was something like nano + plugins. If I had that I could implement most of what I need (other then auto-completion for a crap load of languages).

Vim is very easy, I think it's just simple to get overwhelmed with it. There are a couple of tools which gamify Vim. I personally haven't used them. But some say they're pretty good. For me, what worked was just jumping in and going whole hog. I tried disabling the arrow keys in Normal Mode, so I would have to use hjkl for navigation. But my keyboard puts the arrow keys in easy reach (Kinesis Advantage), so it turned…

I wrote a shell toy to help me learn vim motions.. the idea is you can grab parts of the output of previous shell commands by passing vim motions. So like when you want to say "git checkout " you can do it :)

  git checkout $(lw 5kyiW)
It's more of a toy than a power tool but I do use it somewhat regularly.

https://github.com/bgribble/lw

Re: Vim for Humans

#136

Post by return0 »

gbrown_ wrote: post #3

I've only skimmed this but there seems to be a focus on customizing and plugins from the get go. I think it's worth getting to know Vim "as is" before doing such things. Indeed there certainly some things that aren't the most useful or obvious but it's good to understand their original intent. Not to crap on the author of this but I'd recommend Drew Neil's Practical Vim over this (and pretty much every other Vim book…

The benefit of learning the 'default' vim becomes obvious when u have to log in to a foreign system.

Re: Vim for Humans

#137

Post by Lio »

globuous wrote: post #120
mikegerwitz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C-[ is equivalent to , and is much more natural. I also bind caps lock to ctrl (setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps on a GNU/Linux system), which makes this all the more natural.

Remaping caps lock to ctrl changed my life on vim (amongst other things). I didn't know about C-[ though, i've been using C-c which is also an equivalent by default. On MacOS anyway.

Please note, C-c isn't quite the same as

C-[ is though, and because it's part of the terminal it'll work in other Vi like places like the command line (set -o vi) and ncurses.

Re: Vim for Humans

#138

Post by joemi »

clifanatic wrote: post #23
gbrown_ wrote: post #3

I've only skimmed this but there seems to be a focus on customizing and plugins from the get go. I think it's worth getting to know Vim "as is" before doing such things. Indeed there certainly some things that aren't the most useful or obvious but it's good to understand their original intent. Not to crap on the author of this but I'd recommend Drew Neil's Practical Vim over this (and pretty much every other Vim book…

I always thought that if I were ever to write a book on vim, I'd start with a thorough introduction to ed, followed by a thorough introduction to ex, finally followed by a thorough tutorial on all the features of plain-old vanilla vi, only then to introduce the vim parts and macros and graphics and things.

I can't tell if your comment is sarcastic or not, but I, too, would love to read that.

Re: Vim for Humans

#139

Post by nicolashahn »

figgis wrote: post #128
nicolashahn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep you're right, my bad.

Re: Vim for Humans

#140

Post by Lio »

eikenberry wrote: post #94
mikegerwitz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C-[ is equivalent to , and is much more natural. I also bind caps lock to ctrl (setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps on a GNU/Linux system), which makes this all the more natural.

Why not just change caps-lock to esc. setxkbmap -option caps:escape

One reason would be so that you can use C-h as backspace, C-i as tab and C-m as return without moving your whole hand.

Of course you could map caps lock to be both ctrl and escape at the same time but C-[ is almost as good.

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