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The vi family

lpar.ath0.com

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Re: The vi family

#171

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"If you're wondering why so many people would choose to use a fifty year old text editor with a notoriously steep initial learning curve, it's because once you learn it, you can be ruthlessly efficient with your editing."

Been using vi for decades, mostly nvi and vim 4.6 since UNIX became available for the PC. I still feel like I only utilise a small fraction of what's possible. I believe I do many things "the slow way". In truth I prefer non-interactive editing, e.g., ed, sed, flex

I once saw a video on YouTube that was a "meme" clip of a presenter doing some text manipulation with vi while sharing his screen at a conference. The clip had had been edited to suggest what he was doing with vi was somehow particularly impressive, e.g., mind-blowing "("mind blown")

Everything he was doing was stuff I do all the time. I thought WTF

Re: The vi family

#172

Post by salvesefu »

casey2 wrote: post #5

Sam isn't graphical there is sam and samterm which sends commands to sam. sam itself is an ed style line editor, where the concept of a line is replaced with a dot. vis allows multiple dots. It's worth noting that a lot of the text editing done in the vi family are just calls to ed with different ways of doing selections.

"Sam is designed as two synchronous programs: a command interpreter and a mouse-oriented bitmap windowing interface."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_(text_editor)

Re: The vi family

#174

Post by Cyph0n »

40four wrote: post #119

I’ve been a long time vim user, and I honestly never really bought into the efficiency claims. That gets repeated over and over, but If you’re a slow typer then no editor can really make much of a difference, and development in reality is a lot of reading code and thinking about code when it comes down to it. I’ve never used it because I thought it would make me some lightning fast super developer. I’ve always used i…

Vim is definitely more efficient when it comes to navigation and manipulation (esp via macros), which are the two things we do the most as programmers.

The added benefit I found is that Vim’s purely keyboard based design is much, much easier on the wrists. Heck, I pushed myself to learn Vim because I started to feel wrist pain due to KB and mouse switching.

Re: The vi family

#175

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

4ggr0 wrote: post #101
submeta wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he doesn’t use any config it seems. No syntax highlighting, no line numbers, plain white text on dark background.

he did however decide to use a font which gives off comic sans vibes, which is a very interesting choice for an otherwise very barebones setup :D

openbsd has a funny cultural meme around comic sans. i've seen other writings on it but this might be the origin: https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00025.ht...

some of the openbsd folks use it as a weapon in the fight to prioritize content over presentation. i got a chuckle out of it and it convinced me to stop thoughtlessly hating on comic sans, easy as it is.

Re: The vi family

#176

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

weberer wrote: post #123
4ggr0 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he did however decide to use a font which gives off comic sans vibes, which is a very interesting choice for an otherwise very barebones setup :D

Its probably the font that helps people with dyslexia.

hmm, not quite OpenDyslexic. looks a little like Comic Mono but maybe a little rounder? the "l" is a lot curvier than most comic-like fonts. almost reminds me of one of the annoying Samsung fonts :)

Re: The vi family

#178

Post by rrvsh »

wisemanwillhear wrote: post #167
40four wrote: post #119

I’ve been a long time vim user, and I honestly never really bought into the efficiency claims. That gets repeated over and over, but If you’re a slow typer then no editor can really make much of a difference, and development in reality is a lot of reading code and thinking about code when it comes down to it. I’ve never used it because I thought it would make me some lightning fast super developer. I’ve always used i…

I like vi/vim, but it gets me all too frequently because I'm not precise enough of a typist. I'm busy typing away and I hit the wrong modifier key or hitting caps lock and I end up pulling things up or making changes that I never intended to make. Worse, in the split second after it happens and my muscle memory tries to correct it my immediate intuition of what mode I was in is wrong or which modifier key I'm pressin…

It's very common to disable caps lock or rebind it to something else (e.g. Esc for even more ergonomics)

Re: The vi family

#179

Post by rrvsh »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #171

"If you're wondering why so many people would choose to use a fifty year old text editor with a notoriously steep initial learning curve, it's because once you learn it, you can be ruthlessly efficient with your editing." Been using vi for decades, mostly nvi and vim 4.6 since UNIX became available for the PC. I still feel like I only utilise a small fraction of what's possible. I believe I do many things "the slow w…

Believe me, as someone who grew up coding in Eclipse and Visual Studio in the late 2000s and only learning about (neo)vi(m) in the last three years, it's mind blowing. Just different generations and how the coding culture has changed especially after VS Code blew up in the 2010s and thus was the only editor my generation would ever use for the most part

Re: The vi family

#180

Post by m463 »

40four wrote: post #119

I’ve been a long time vim user, and I honestly never really bought into the efficiency claims. That gets repeated over and over, but If you’re a slow typer then no editor can really make much of a difference, and development in reality is a lot of reading code and thinking about code when it comes down to it. I’ve never used it because I thought it would make me some lightning fast super developer. I’ve always used i…

vi was pretty efficient in the (terminal) era it launched in.

specifically, the keys used by vi were there on every (terminal) keyboard.

In comparison, emacs heavily depended on modifier keys, which were pretty non-standard and if found, frequently were in different places on each keyboard.

That said, more complex editing tasks using modes/automation/etc might be more efficient with emacs.

personally, I have "thresholds". quick/dirty can be vi, more involved goes to emacs. same with scripting, quick/dirty shell script, more involved to something like python. ymmv

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