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What Is Vim?

blog.jonas.foo

131–140 of 179 posts

Re: What Is Vim?

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they’re always frustratingly incomplete and/or buggy. Have you tried evil-mode (Emacs VI Layer - E.V.I.L.), an implementation of the vim-bindings in Emacs? I've heard it works very well. Or, at least, the Emacs subreddit seems to get a pretty steady flow of people who come from vim and get into Doom Emacs, which has evil-mode (and lots of other stuff) pre-configured and ready to go. They seem very happy, from r…

This is my current setup, and I love it. To me it brings together the best of vim with the richness of Emacs. Setting up Emacs from scratch is quite the project though if you want all the bells and whistles

To get all the bells and whistles done oneself, yes, it is time and learning.

Using Emacs with no bells and whistles just for writing is very enjoyable too, though! That's how I started. Within an hour or two I'd removed any visual clutter from the screen, and put on some dark theme (just clicking around the menu bar).

M-x help-with-tutorial (which came up when I first ran it, and I said oh, what's that), and that was me gone!

For weeks and weeks all I did was pump out text files with no formatting, being amazed that I could jump forward and backwards over words, sentences, and lines. It was an absolute joy, with a warm feeling of clarity and clean-ness to it.

Re: What Is Vim?

#132

> There's a Vim mode in every single mainstream code editor out there. And they’re always frustratingly incomplete and/or buggy. Some motions will be unimplemented, or will behave incorrectly, especially with regards to boundaries around whitespace inclusion or exclusion in a motion. Things you added to Vim and got used to are unavailable, and so your ysa") to put parentheses around the string your cursor is on just…

There's a vscode extension that embeds NeoVim and just uses VSCode UI as a front end to delegate key presses to: https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim This yields a better experience than the old half baked VSCode vim emulation.

This setup 'just' works for me. I have mapped certain functionality, for e.g. toggling the file explorer to a nvim keymap (the extension also enables h, j, k, l, y, p, etc. commands in the explorer) but I use the cmd/ctrl + P keymap for searching files in the current project, so it feels incomplete sometimes. When I am editing a set of files it works great, but as soon as I use a VS code feature, for e.g. project search, the experience is okay and may require a mouse, which is not surprising but I hope the integration gets even better.

I am sure that with more configuration, the experience could be made more NeoVim like but I don't know whether I should spend time doing this or invest my time learning/adapting to a terminal based flow for the few tasks for which I am used to the VS Code GUI (browsing Git history, diffs for pull requests, git stash operations, debugging).

I started with a base config (kickstart.nvim) after trying out LazyVim sometime back, but kept going back to VS Code for some of the tasks. So what I have now is not significantly better but I like it.

Re: What Is Vim?

#133

Vim is not only an editing language, but a fast-starting editor with a small-ish native executable, and small run-time memory use. This facet is typically not ported into other editors that have a Vim mode. Vim runs natively inside virtual machines and containers, on resource-constrained embedded systems, and on remotely accessed machines. Another aspect is that Vim can be operated entirely using a terminal emulator,…

I use Emacs with Evil. But for looping macros on big files I use Neovim.

Re: What Is Vim?

#134

> There's a Vim mode in every single mainstream code editor out there. And they’re always frustratingly incomplete and/or buggy. Some motions will be unimplemented, or will behave incorrectly, especially with regards to boundaries around whitespace inclusion or exclusion in a motion. Things you added to Vim and got used to are unavailable, and so your ysa") to put parentheses around the string your cursor is on just…

> And they’re always frustratingly incomplete and/or buggy. Have you tried evil-mode (Emacs VI Layer - E.V.I.L.), an implementation of the vim-bindings in Emacs? I've heard it works very well. Or, at least, the Emacs subreddit seems to get a pretty steady flow of people who come from vim and get into Doom Emacs, which has evil-mode (and lots of other stuff) pre-configured and ready to go. They seem very happy, from r…

evil on Emacs has been great for me. I’ve been using vim for 20 years (vim, visual studio, vim again, now Emacs) and Emacs/evil for at least 5 years or so.

I’ve heard someone say that Emacs with Evil is a better vim than vim. I’m inclined to agree.

Re: What Is Vim?

#135

> There's a Vim mode in every single mainstream code editor out there. And they’re always frustratingly incomplete and/or buggy. Some motions will be unimplemented, or will behave incorrectly, especially with regards to boundaries around whitespace inclusion or exclusion in a motion. Things you added to Vim and got used to are unavailable, and so your ysa") to put parentheses around the string your cursor is on just…

There's a vscode extension that embeds NeoVim and just uses VSCode UI as a front end to delegate key presses to: https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim This yields a better experience than the old half baked VSCode vim emulation.

I used this for a few months and went back to the vim emulator [1]. I can't recall what but some of the things kept breaking in Neovim. And the frequent, near daily extension updates were annoying.

1. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevi...

Re: What Is Vim?

#137
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL this made me chuckle. :) I always remap caps to ctrl because ctrl-[ is an acceptable escape key for me as I like to use other insert mode shortcuts. Eg ctrl-h, ctrl-m, ctrl-k etc. I know some people map to escape/ctrl when held but that usually means installing something like Karabiner.

Well then you should mention it when talking about vim to non-vimmers as not to leave them in the dark with the defaults. The question is not what solution you found to avoid the Escape key but that you did. And even though you are probably used to your solution having the most important key in your program be a weird combo is not great imho. And you are missing out on bash/zsh/gdb and other command line vim modes.

> And you are missing out on bash/zsh/gdb and other command line vim modes.

I'm not at all, ctrl-[ is a terminal thing. It's available everywhere as are the the other ctrl shortcuts I mentioned.

Re: What Is Vim?

#138
post #69
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think there’s any reason why you have to learn Vi/Vim. I think someone could go their whole career without that. That seems like a perfectly legitimate choice to me. …but, I learned vi somewhere between less running on MSDOS and an embedded programming course at uni in the 90s. I’ve used the those shortcuts in database clients, shells and web browsers, etc. ever since. That’s a long time and a lot of value. I…

>"Being able to know something like that and bring it with you across operating systems has been useful." I did not say it is not useful for people who use it. I imagine for them it gets the job done perfectly. We do not have to be all the same.

Sorry I hope it came across in my message but I totally agree with you.

We most definitely do not need to all use the same tools for the job. Vive la différence.

Re: What Is Vim?

#139

Vim is not only an editing language, but a fast-starting editor with a small-ish native executable, and small run-time memory use. This facet is typically not ported into other editors that have a Vim mode. Vim runs natively inside virtual machines and containers, on resource-constrained embedded systems, and on remotely accessed machines. Another aspect is that Vim can be operated entirely using a terminal emulator,…

IME, vim is also easier to compile statically than nvi and other vi clones that are actually smaller than vim.

Re: What Is Vim?

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a vscode extension that embeds NeoVim and just uses VSCode UI as a front end to delegate key presses to: https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim This yields a better experience than the old half baked VSCode vim emulation.

This setup 'just' works for me. I have mapped certain functionality, for e.g. toggling the file explorer to a nvim keymap (the extension also enables h, j, k, l, y, p, etc. commands in the explorer) but I use the cmd/ctrl + P keymap for searching files in the current project, so it feels incomplete sometimes. When I am editing a set of files it works great, but as soon as I use a VS code feature, for e.g. project sea…

I tend to agree with this, but I went in the reverse direction. I started out with kickstart.nvim and moved to LazyVim when I saw what Folke was doing with it. It's an excellent config and rarely chokes on large files or breaks, even though the development is very rapid.
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