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Vim after 15 Years

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141–150 of 176 posts

Re: Vim after 15 Years

#141

Vim is the best lightweight single file editor there is. That’s all it should be. If you’re heavily configuring it, you should be able to answer “why is this better than an ide?” Without saying “vim makes me cool”. Also, if you can answer that, please let me know! To me, an IDE is better for everything but what default vim is good at. And if you tell me that typing is faster, please also tell me why that’s relevant!

> And if you tell me that typing is faster, please also tell me why that’s relevant! Clearly the less understood thing about vim. People keep thinking this means "typing more words", while what it means is "having the change you have in mind faster on your screen". It's not about writing more code, it's about not having your code lagging compared to your brain. Anyway, to me, this is not even the best feature of vim.…

That’s true, vims automation is great. I’ve had some success with multiple cursors in sublime text for instance, but vim really is the king here.

Re: Vim after 15 Years

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently switched from iTerm2 to Alacritty https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty . It does not have scrollback, splits, tabs and other fancy features. But for me, performance and snappiness is the most important feature (besides, I use Tmux for all those things mentioned). For getting something close to i3 (you wont...?) on macOS I am using chunkwm https://github.com/koekeishiya/chunkwm . I spent some time during the…

An article linked in the OP shows that default Terminal.app is more responsive than Alacritty or iTerm. [1]: https://danluu.com/term-latency/

It also says that both of them are limited by tmux, which I use 100% of the time in the terminal. The real problem is when you run Vim in tmux and start to scroll in a large file that you notice that Terminal.app does not cut it. It lags badly. In Alacritty its silky smooth.

And yes, scrolling with j/k for longer periods may be an anti-pattern in Vim and yada yada... I scroll in Vim, and in Alacritty its smooth, in Terminal.app its sluggish.

Re: Vim after 15 Years

#143

Interesting read, I've been using Vim for some 18 years myself and I was completely unaware of fzf. However, I'm curious if you know `rg` (aka. ripgrep): https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep In my experience it's markedly faster than `ag` (which is markedly faster than `grep`).

RipGrep kicks Ass. (Ag is excellent as well) Both these guys did terrific work on these tools.

Re: Vim after 15 Years

#144

I was split between using Emacs and Vim for last 2 years (I used Vim for last 6, and learned Emacs 2 years ago). But what made Vim my main editor is fzf and ag, and smooth workflow that I had in terminal. But I have to say, ivy and counsel made my Emacs experience much, much nicer. But I guess that I got too deep into Vim already that I kinda got used to it so much, that I appreciated more that "terminal" workflow.

> I was split between using Emacs and Vim for last 2 years You're going to have to pick a side. You can't be an atheist that dabbles in Catholicism.

(longtime Emacs user here)

  I'd never consider switching; I'm in too deep.
  It might be easier to change religions, than change editors.

Re: Vim after 15 Years

#145
post #14

I'm an avid tmux+neovim user, too, though working with Reason is a lot easier in VS Code. Making the switch from actual vim to fake vim (ie JS emulation) sucks. Recently, VSCodeVim merged #1725 to add actual neovim as an editor - it's using NeoVim's embedding API so you're using neovim to edit the text file inside of VSCode's chrome, including all of VSCode's type hints and popups. Info here: https://github.com/VSCod…

Also there is https://github.com/extr0py/oni, an editor also based on Electron

Re: Vim after 15 Years

#146
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll use an IDE for that. These are usually attempts at reducing the need for IDEs, while keeping the familiar vim editing. With no exceptions so far, no IDE plugin (or emacs plugin, for that matter) has been able to emulate vim editing well enough to replace vim as my primary editor. Perhaps when neovim (or anything else) is able to give me native vim capabilities in a more extensible or powerful editor, I'll swit…

It sounds like you haven't given it a whirl. I've been on neovim for about about 3 years now after 5 years of native vim and it's been a complete drag-and-drop.

Sorry for the confusion, but I'm talking about moving out of the vim ecosystem into Visual Studio or one of the Jetbrains IDEs or Eclipse when they can integrate an actual vim environment; not about moving from vim to neovim.

Re: Vim after 15 Years

#147
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I don't get: for years, vi (and vim) mocked the emacs community (with some justification) for throwing everything and the kitchen sink into our editor. We were building an entire operating environment, while vi was providing a nice, solid, fast text editor. But with vim & neovim, people are building a complex operating environment in a terrible language, and ignoring the man-centuries of effort which have…

I've given emacs 3 tries. First just main emacs, then with Evil mode, and last time as Spacemacs. Every time the issue is the same: there is won't be any significant improvement to justify the re-learning curve of everything. Imo fuzzy finding and git plugins isn't a huge stretch for a editor. I still wouldn't like to read my email from vim.

> Every time the issue is the same: there is won't be any significant improvement to justify the re-learning curve of everything.

Magit and org-mode are a killer pair of reasons for many. Dunno if they would be for you, though.

Re: Vim after 15 Years

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently switched from iTerm2 to Alacritty https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty . It does not have scrollback, splits, tabs and other fancy features. But for me, performance and snappiness is the most important feature (besides, I use Tmux for all those things mentioned). For getting something close to i3 (you wont...?) on macOS I am using chunkwm https://github.com/koekeishiya/chunkwm . I spent some time during the…

An article linked in the OP shows that default Terminal.app is more responsive than Alacritty or iTerm. [1]: https://danluu.com/term-latency/

Word of caution when reviewing this report: it doesn't take into account vblank period. If you hit a key just after a monitor refresh, you're not going to see it until the next refresh cycle which is typically up to 16ms later. This study is concerned with how long it takes to update the frame buffer rather than time-to-visible which is difficult to measure.

That said, there are plans[1] to reduce Alacritty's input latency. Though, I personally use it as a daily driver and have never felt that there was a noticeable input lag.

Once that lands, Alacritty will have similar latency to Terminal.app _and also have_ a 60 Hz refresh rate (the "smooth" feeling), low CPU usage, and much higher throughput.

[1]: https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/673

Re: Vim after 15 Years

#149
post #106

I've been using vim about 20 years now. Maybe I'm weird but I don't use any plugins. When I want more than what Vim does I use something else. Autocomplete, find usages, etc? I'll use an IDE for that. When I need to refactor a 500MB text file without hanging my machine, I'll use vim.

You're not weird, but you're not a vim user, or the target of this post.

Re: Vim after 15 Years

#150
I avoid using too many plugins because the biggest advantage of using vim is its ubiquity on every *nix and BSD-based OS. I don’t want my workflow to become reliant on things I might not be able to use. Also, vim on its own is really damn powerful.
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