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Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained (2023)

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Re: Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained (2023)

#21

Post by quotemstr »

susam wrote: post #11
hatmatrix wrote: post #5

I've tried Vi/Vim key bindings on several occasions, but just couldn't be efficient in it. It's often touted as the "superior" form that confers benefit to those who invest time to learn it, but discussions with other coders have led me to believe this is just confirmation bias by people who prefer these key bindings. There are people like myself who edit frequently while writing (even with in a single sentence or wo…

I use both Vim and Emacs, extensively, so I'd just like to share my experience with mode switching in Vim. Personally, I don't find Vim mode switching to be much of a problem while editing text. It has become muscle memory to stay in normal mode by default. After any insert-mode operation, I instinctively return to normal mode. It's just a habit at this point. Take, for example, writing a for loop. I might type: for…

It never made any sense to me that people claim Emacs has no modes. What do you think you're doing when you hold down a modifier key? What else would it be except entering a mode in which other keys have a different meaning? Is that really different from vim's mode switching? They're just different ways of expressing modifiers.

Re: Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained (2023)

#22

Post by quotemstr »

000ooo000 wrote: post #2

Here come the "[..] anyway I'm happy with VSCode" comments

Technical moncultures are bad. The VSCode people ought to at least tolerate VSCode refuseniks as a kind of endangered species, worth keeping around out of a mixture of sentiment and insurance against memetic stagnation

Re: Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained (2023)

#23

Post by tgv »

000ooo000 wrote: post #2

Here come the "[..] anyway I'm happy with VSCode" comments

I've grown up on vi and later emacs, but VSCode is no joke. It does almost everything, and most of it better, and more intuitively. There's no reason to torture yourself with counting characters, words or lines in order to get the delete command correct in one go.

Re: Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained (2023)

#24

Post by sussmannbaka »

w4yai wrote: post #15
000ooo000 wrote: post #2

Here come the "[..] anyway I'm happy with VSCode" comments

I feel like those trying to teach me Vim are the same who refused to learn to use VsCode. Once configured, I can do the same than Vim. With more features.

> Once configured

is doing some heavy lifting here. "Once configured" vim can do the same you can do in VsCode. Editor wars are really the dumbest nerd fight.

Re: Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained (2023)

#25

Post by SaintRomuald »

I tried vim motions as a daily driver many times but, I don't think that with today's expansive IDEs vim motions are all that superior. IDEs have very competent shortcuts and features built in.

My biggest problems with vim are lack of feature discoverability and the fact that you can't change the keybindings. It's very hard to learn new things in Vim without specifically googling for them. It's highly likely that if I sat down to some online course I could learn a lot more about the Vim way of editing but I could never sit through one long enough to discover new things, so most of the things I learn about Vim come from me specifically looking up how to do certain things, not a bad way to learn, but I feel like I never got extremely proficient becasue I didn't go deep enough.

I find a lot of the keybinding to be unintuitive or not very ergonomic or inconsistent, but I also don't want to rebind anything because part of the reason vim is so useful is the fact that you get this tool with every linux install and changing things means you're no longer using The Vim. On the contrary it feels perfectly fine to tweak your IDE's keybindings because that IDE is already very specific to your needs.

Re: Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained (2023)

#26

Post by kavith »

I’ve been using vim-extensions on VSCode/ Zed/ SQL Editors for a few years now and always thought I had the best of both worlds with this setup. But after switching to Cursor it seems like simply hitting tab is a lot faster than performing a vim motion in most cases and so I don’t see why people would still need Vim in 10 years time.

Re: Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained (2023)

#28

Post by PaulRobinson »

w4yai wrote: post #15
000ooo000 wrote: post #2

Here come the "[..] anyway I'm happy with VSCode" comments

I feel like those trying to teach me Vim are the same who refused to learn to use VsCode. Once configured, I can do the same than Vim. With more features.

You do you, but I'd be curious to hear what you think you can do in VS Code that you can't do in vim - what these "more features" are. Vim, and Neovim, have an expansive plugin culture. They are designed to be very configurable and customisable, so that the software fits around you and what you need to do. What features do you find missing?

Also, I get that you feel vim users are being a bit evangelical - "trying to teach", as you put it - but I can assure you that I, for one, have used VS Code plenty (including using vim keybindings), and it's just not very good for me. It doesn't fit me.

It's slow, it's not as configurable to my needs. I sometimes have nothing more than my iPad Pro (and magic keyboard), with me - I can mosh/ssh into a dev box, tmux up a session get to work easily, I never found a nice way to make VS Code work in this pattern.

What's the point in being a software engineer if you can't have software that fits you? Yes, vim has a learning curve, but then I get to make it my own and make it fit what I need. Same with tmux, my shell, and so on. In my experience, VS Code forced me a little more to fit to it rather than the other way around.

Like I say, you do you, but don't think all vim fans are talking from a place of ignorance.

Re: Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained (2023)

#29

Post by palata »

I have been using vim for 15 years. I disagree with the idea that it makes me more efficient than someone else. First, because I have friends who don't use vim and are very fast. Second because most of my time as a developer is not spent writing/editing text.

No, I love vim because of its ergonomics. If I use a mouse for too long, my arm/shoulder starts hurting. Maybe I could improve the ergonomics of my mouse (having a vertical mouse already helped), but using vim and a tiling window manager allow me to drastically reduce my use of the mouse. It makes me more efficient than me when I use a less ergonomic setup, sure. But that's me.

It's all about ergonomics, and everyone is different. It's okay to be faster with a mouse or on an iPad.

Re: Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained (2023)

#30

Post by PaulRobinson »

vachina wrote: post #8
000ooo000 wrote: post #2

Here come the "[..] anyway I'm happy with VSCode" comments

Vim feels equivalent to a horse carrier in comparison to vscode to a modern car.

To me, vscode feels like a huge truck with too small an engine, and vim feels like a sports car.
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