Why Vi Rocks • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#21

Post by org3432 » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 2:06 AM UTC

cwbrandsma wrote: post #6

I’ve learned some vi, and emacs, Visual Studio, VS Code, XCode, IntelliJ, and Android Studio. All the examples listed are pretty uncommon or trivial in any of the other IDEs (aside from the regex part, which is cool, but I never want to be in a place where I have to regex my code...ever). 90% of the time I’m doing simple code maintenance, with an occasional refactoring. And I know devs that swear by vi...they are dev…

> And I know devs that swear by vi...they are developing any faster than I am

I hear about this from time to time, but have never seen it people do it successfully first hand, what I do see is silly mistakes in their checkins; incomplete variable renames, formatting is off, syntax errors, switching between browsers and their code while looking at manuals, or other obvious mistakes that can be caught inline by IDEs while you type.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#22

Post by rococode » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 2:06 AM UTC

IntelliJ with the IdeaVim plugin is my goto editor nowadays. As others have said, I honestly don't find myself using the really fancy features of vim that often. What I do use frequently are basic motions together with yanking, deletions, word movement (w/e/b), marks, indents, centering (zz), page scrolls (ctrl+u/d), and using searches (f and /) to jump around in code quickly.

For those purposes, IdeaVim works just fine, and gives me all the little speed boosts of vim with the added bonus of (in my opinion) a much more robust coding environment. It even makes some functions better; for example, `gd` works super well and nearly instantly in IntelliJ since the definitions are supplied by the IDE's 'Go To Declaration' rather than some hacky vim plugin. Other editors have similarly sufficient vim plugins, e.g. VSCodeVim.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#23

Post by milin » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 2:06 AM UTC

adrianrocamora wrote: post #8

I've been using Neovim consistently for the last few months and it's a game-changer. Terminals within Neovim that I can paste into/from my Vimwiki files or source files is amazing. It's not very different from a Vim setup and using it with the Qt GUI on Windows gets rid if the issue of having everything close when eventually having to call . Meanwhile, in my linux environment it runs like a charm on a terminal.

Same here neovim with session management and tmux with session management, with tmux russerect and tmux continuum. And with the language server integration in neovim, its a swiss army knife that works well with most modern languages and devops.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#24

Post by amanzi » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 2:07 AM UTC

"vi is the de facto standard Unix editor, you find it in every *NIX derived OS"

I was going mention a recent article I heard about that vi was going to be removed from upcoming Ubuntu distributions, but it appears that was an April Fools joke...

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#25

Post by bgorman » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 2:10 AM UTC

The few times I have encountered nvi, it was just off enough from vim to give me a headache. Somehow it is worse than busybox vi, where I at least know to stick to primitive operations.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#26

Post by nouveaux » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

org3432 wrote: post #21

cwbrandsma wrote: post #6

I’ve learned some vi, and emacs, Visual Studio, VS Code, XCode, IntelliJ, and Android Studio. All the examples listed are pretty uncommon or trivial in any of the other IDEs (aside from the regex part, which is cool, but I never want to be in a place where I have to regex my code...ever). 90% of the time I’m doing simple code maintenance, with an occasional refactoring. And I know devs that swear by vi...they are dev…

> And I know devs that swear by vi...they are developing any faster than I am I hear about this from time to time, but have never seen it people do it successfully first hand, what I do see is silly mistakes in their checkins; incomplete variable renames, formatting is off, syntax errors, switching between browsers and their code while looking at manuals, or other obvious mistakes that can be caught inline by IDEs wh…

I see the same thing from people using vscode. Its safe to say that those who know their tools well will be more productive than those who do not.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#27

Post by anotherevan » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 2:16 AM UTC

umvi wrote: post #14

Vim is like Dvorak. The cognitive burden for remembering which key maps to what is high unless you use it 24/7.

Does anyone use Vim on a Dvorak keyboard?

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#28

Post by foob » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 2:19 AM UTC

rococode wrote: post #22

IntelliJ with the IdeaVim plugin is my goto editor nowadays. As others have said, I honestly don't find myself using the really fancy features of vim that often. What I do use frequently are basic motions together with yanking, deletions, word movement (w/e/b), marks, indents, centering (zz), page scrolls (ctrl+u/d), and using searches (f and /) to jump around in code quickly. For those purposes, IdeaVim works just f…

Have they fixed the issues with where the cursor ends up after certain operations? It's been a couple of years since I've used it, so I can't give an explicit example, but there were multiple common operations where the cursor would end up in a different location afterwards than it does in vim. This was really difficult for me because I still used vim a lot for other things, and it felt like it was actively eroding my muscle memory to use two conflicting implementations.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#29

Post by geowwy » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

anotherevan wrote: post #27

umvi wrote: post #14

Vim is like Dvorak. The cognitive burden for remembering which key maps to what is high unless you use it 24/7.

Does anyone use Vim on a Dvorak keyboard?

I use vim with colemak.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#30

Post by org3432 » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 2:22 AM UTC

nouveaux wrote: post #26

org3432 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I know devs that swear by vi...they are developing any faster than I am I hear about this from time to time, but have never seen it people do it successfully first hand, what I do see is silly mistakes in their checkins; incomplete variable renames, formatting is off, syntax errors, switching between browsers and their code while looking at manuals, or other obvious mistakes that can be caught inline by IDEs wh…

I see the same thing from people using vscode. Its safe to say that those who know their tools well will be more productive than those who do not.

I think VS Code has the same issues I see it with that too, I haven't noticed it as much with VisualStudio and JetBrains' IDEs. Agree completely on knowing how to use your tools, it's like a carpenter showing up for work with a rusty hand saw and thinking they're going to make a house with it.