Ah, a good old fashioned editor wars thread, surely the comments will be reasonable.
_editor1_ sucks.. you can pry _editor2_ from my cold dead hands.
GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
151–160 of 303 posts
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like I said, there's no convincing you. On previous tens of discussion surely someone has came up with something, only for you to dismiss it as gimmicky. I am not going to spend much effort on a lost cause, but quick googling came up with this blog: https://eli-rodriguez.com/en/posts/modal-editing-the-superio... Enjoy moving your cursor around when you edit text, but welcome to the club if I am wrong and you can be c…
So no data at all, just anecdotes from zealots. You're right, that's not going to convince me. Because I apply the same basic standard of plausibility that I do to all claims I hear. When someone tells me I should start using homeopathy, and there's no need for any actual evidence in favor of it because the benefits are "well known" to its practitioners, I don't need to hear any more to make up my mind. This is reall…
Considering this is a subjective interest, what kind of data are you looking for? A measuring contest that happen to control on individual skills? What kind of data may satisfy your high bar of acceptance?
Let's take a step back from vim: what kind of data will demonstrate satisfactory performance over any kind of editor for your liking?
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. So everyone should use system-wide keyboard shortcuts. Preferably your favourites, right? At least they should work well for your favourite window manager, I suppose? Because those who like different shortcuts and different window managers are weird and don't understand UX. /s My preference is to start with a minimalistic system that works on most platforms, and where I can install what I want. If I wanted a s…
Sadly, you chose sarcastic trolling instead of clearly communicating your point. However, it seems like you're assuming system-wide keyboard shortcuts and consistent defaults means you can't change anything. On macOS, you can change the keyboard shortcuts, including idiosyncratic ones, of (almost?) any application, certainly any pure Cocoa one. I have Word set up so that CmdV pastes unformatted, for example, and I ha…
Sorry for the communication style, that's noted. I meant to communicate a point though.
My point is that I don't want vim to copy with "Cmd + V" (I want the vim bindings there), and maybe I want to reuse "Cmd + V" in Blender for something more important than "paste" (assuming that "pasting" is not really a concept in Blender, I don't know). But still I want "Cmd + V" in Word and in my e-mail client. How do you set that in the system-wide settings?
I would guess that macOS does not strictly enforce the system bindings, does it? Say it does -> application developers lose flexibility because they can't design a different UX if they want to. Say it doesn't -> application developers now have to decide, for each binding, if they want to define a default themselves (which would be consistent with the rest of their app) or if they want to honor the system bindings (and possibly have a terrible UX that people will complain about).
It's not an easy problem :-).
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. So everyone should use system-wide keyboard shortcuts. Preferably your favourites, right? At least they should work well for your favourite window manager, I suppose? Because those who like different shortcuts and different window managers are weird and don't understand UX. /s My preference is to start with a minimalistic system that works on most platforms, and where I can install what I want. If I wanted a s…
Sadly, you chose sarcastic trolling instead of clearly communicating your point. However, it seems like you're assuming system-wide keyboard shortcuts and consistent defaults means you can't change anything. On macOS, you can change the keyboard shortcuts, including idiosyncratic ones, of (almost?) any application, certainly any pure Cocoa one. I have Word set up so that CmdV pastes unformatted, for example, and I ha…
macOS shortcut editing/configuration is an unsung strength of the platform; it’s quite amazing and anyone who uses macOS should spend an hour investigating it.
Your past shortcut change is something I’ve done similarly but you can also assign shortcuts to menu commands that you use often but don’t have one, etc.
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you even hurt yourself with something that has on-screen help?
When people don't know what ^X means - it's Linux, most tools are very specific of flags and the order in which you put them on the command line. So is nano saying - SHIFT-[6](^)-SHIFT-X - SHIFT-[6](^)-x - CTRL-[6](^)-SHIFT-X - CTRL-[6](^)-x All I see is '^X', on my keyboard '^' is on 6. Why the hell isn't this working? Little does little Sally know that this is a UNIXism, carat means 'CTRL', X is really just 'x' - b…
If our protagonist is familiar with macOS, as is far from impossible, they may be less confused by the ^ prefix, which in macOS means Ctrl: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/cpmh0011/mac
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, having system wide keyboard shortcuts will almost certainly impose unwanted constraints on how an app can behave.
Exactly, that's the whole damn point. It's to constrain those app devs from making stupid UI choices.
But that's the thing: in my opinion, this is exactly not the Linux philosophy. Maybe the majority of Linux users want it to behave like macOS and it will go there someday. And at this point I will move to the next thing closest to what I believe is the Linux philosophy.
But right now, I would say simply: "if you want the macOS philosophy, use macOS". And don't get me wrong: macOS is great.
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, you chose sarcastic trolling instead of clearly communicating your point. However, it seems like you're assuming system-wide keyboard shortcuts and consistent defaults means you can't change anything. On macOS, you can change the keyboard shortcuts, including idiosyncratic ones, of (almost?) any application, certainly any pure Cocoa one. I have Word set up so that CmdV pastes unformatted, for example, and I ha…
Sorry for the communication style, that's noted. I meant to communicate a point though. My point is that I don't want vim to copy with "Cmd + V" (I want the vim bindings there), and maybe I want to reuse "Cmd + V" in Blender for something more important than "paste" (assuming that "pasting" is not really a concept in Blender, I don't know). But still I want "Cmd + V" in Word and in my e-mail client. How do you set th…
You can override things like paste system-wide or you can customize it for a particular app.
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an enthousiastic vim user. I think everyone who spends a lot if time editing text and who doesn't use vim (or similar) is probably missing out (including the author of this article). I think vim is really good. But I 100% agree that vim is a stupid default. In almost every context it's going to confuse more people than it makes happy.
I have used VI in and out since introduced to it on Xenix in 1993. Definitely not missing out.
I know I'm not going to convince everyone, and I know that there are other advanced options that compete (people tell me I'm missing out because I don't use an IDE with all the auto complete stuff).
But I see a lot of people using a text editor that's basically notepad, possibly with syntax highlighting. For an occasional edit that's fine, but if you regularly spend more than an hour editing a file, you would benefit from more features.
Vim has a lot if features I don't know, so I think I'm also missing out (until I learn those features). It takes investment of time to learn an advanced tool.
I'm curious, what text editor do you use?
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
So no data at all, just anecdotes from zealots. You're right, that's not going to convince me. Because I apply the same basic standard of plausibility that I do to all claims I hear. When someone tells me I should start using homeopathy, and there's no need for any actual evidence in favor of it because the benefits are "well known" to its practitioners, I don't need to hear any more to make up my mind. This is reall…
Considering this is a subjective interest, what kind of data are you looking for? A measuring contest that happen to control on individual skills? What kind of data may satisfy your high bar of acceptance? Let's take a step back from vim: what kind of data will demonstrate satisfactory performance over any kind of editor for your liking?
Any published study comparing performance of experienced modal vs. non-modal editor users on common tasks would be interesting already. Basically, standard UX research stuff. Figuring out how to control for differences in skill etc. is literally the job of people who conduct such research.
I mean, there are studies examining how the quality of Git commits is affected by blood alcohol levels, so that doesn't seem like an overly exotic topic by comparison.
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Preferably your favourites, right? System-wide does not imply unconfigurable, it just means that all programs derive some of their behavior from an external source. If I want Ctrl+P to paste text across every single application that accepts text and I only have to configure it once in one place, I see that as a win.
> If I want Ctrl+P to paste text across every single application that accepts text and I only have to configure it once in one place, I see that as a win. Ok, so let's say I write a video game. Should my game have reasonable defaults, or should it ask you to go to your system-wide settings and setup all the bindings for my game? For instance, I have a "jump" action. Can I bind it to the spacebar, or should I go check…
> Ok, so let's say I write a video game. Should my game have reasonable defaults, or should it ask you to go to your system-wide settings and setup all the bindings for my game?
Note that I specifically mentioned text. We've all agreed on how to write text, we've all agreed on how to read text, why can't we all agree on how we edit text? Text is a universal standard, games are not. Your game can have whatever keybindings it deems sane but the second I click on a textbox to enter my name I expect my keybindings to work because I'm no longer in the game's context, I'm inside a text context.
Using the user's preferences is a sane default but it's just that - a default, capable of being altered. That default might not be the most intuitive for your specific application and you can let the user know there's a better alternative but at least that default doesn't completely paralyze the user until they've taken the time to learn your specific way of doing things, as is the case with Vim.