21–30 of 98 posts
Using VIM saves you time and a smart user will search out the ways the editor can help her, but there's no value in making the user go cold turkey.
For what it's worth, the author (sankho) mentions that he uses other editors for project-wide find and replace. This can be done in vim too (although I do not --- I'll return to this). You can check out the typically great vimcasts post on this: http://vimcasts.org/episodes/project-wide-find-and-replace/ For whatever reason, I find it easier to use commandline tools to do large search and replaces. I do embrace the v…
It uses Ag to search over each file and Perl to perform the necessary regex. It also creates *.bak backup files in case I replaced something that wasn't supposed to be replaced, but will remove those backup files if I'm in a Git repo (because I basically had to `git clean -f` every time after using this command...so I just wrote it into the command)
The great advantage of vim is that it forces you to use only the keyboard. No mouse at all! Mouse is slow. Keyboard is fast (once you get used to it).
F5 Up F2
Left Down Right
Tab Del Backspace
Enter Space ESC
> Relax! No other text editor has as many developers working on plugins than VIM. What about emacs?
(Sorry. I had to. Don't hate me!)
vim overhyped as an editor? It might be overhyped as a programming tool (you won't write 2x the same amount of lines in a day; you will not be 5x more productive), but as an editor, it deserves every single bit of hype that it has. No other editor stands next to vim. A lot of people dislike editors. It's fine. There are a million tools out there that help people become more productive programmers. You might enjoy Int…
I've switched from vim to kakoune some time ago. vim does have the advantage of a bigger ecosystem, but I do believe it is possible to have an editor better than it.
The thing about Vim is that I cannot imagine creating it and thinking, "This will be much faster and easier than a mouse eventually". But, I also wouldn't think that I could learn how to type fast without looking at the keys if I just stumbled across a keyboard, but both are undoubtedly true. Like anything physical, it requires practice and muscle memory. Would you rather go back to looking at every single key to typ…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Recently, I switched to i3[0] and Vimium[1] and it's just wonderful. Now I'm way faster than before and hardly ever use the mouse. [0] https://i3wm.org [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...
As a slight aside, how did you choose i3 over the other tiling window managers? I chose xmonad at one time, but it was more or less by chance --- someone else used it that I knew, and so I tried it. But I haven't actually compared any.
The thing about Vim is that I cannot imagine creating it and thinking, "This will be much faster and easier than a mouse eventually". But, I also wouldn't think that I could learn how to type fast without looking at the keys if I just stumbled across a keyboard, but both are undoubtedly true. Like anything physical, it requires practice and muscle memory. Would you rather go back to looking at every single key to typ…
Doesn't vim (or similar schemas) predate the mouse?
now you should try Spacemacs
I found a number of things just work way better in emacs than in vim. For example, web-mode was a revelation for me. I could never get vim to get syntax right in mixed HTML-JS files.
Ability to edit very large files with ease was another one in favour of emacs. Vim would freeze up for a seconds or two while saving even half a megabyte file.
helm and family blew my mind away.
Another win spacemacs is it does not hide default emacs functionality. All default emacs keyboard shortcuts would always work, so learning vanilla emacs is still helpful.
Once I got to know spacemacs shortcut layout, it was surprisingly intutive.
(YMMV)
As a sysadmin, I appreciate the fact that some form of vi exists on any vaguely unix-like machine I log into. Even without a .vimrc, the basic commands for line editing and searching work and they match with tools like less (or does less match vi?) and using vi has become second nature over time because it's everywhere and it tends to be the default (I hate it when someone makes nano the default $EDITOR so that eg. sudoedit doesn't do the right thing)
I wish Windows servers shipped with vi, too. A decent text editor is the one thing I consistently find myself missing. Notepad most definitely does not count.