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Modeless Vim

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Re: Modeless Vim

#221

Post by IndrekR »

nrabulinski wrote: post #134
reactordev wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair - coffee cake in the US is cake to have with coffee and doesn’t normally contain any coffee. In the UK and EU, coffee cake is cake with coffee. Likewise tea cakes in the US are cakes made with tea and tea cakes in UK and EU are cakes to have with tea. So… Not a lie, just a Spider-Man meets Spider-Man moment when you learn you can actually make coffee cakes with coffee (or espresso) and you can make tea cak…

I’m from the EU and I’ve never had coffee cake with no coffee nor tea cake with no tea. Very fascinating tidbit about the naming, TIL

To confuse matters more, in this part of EU the coffee cake is made with coffee and tea cake is made without tea.

Re: Modeless Vim

#222

Post by RMPR »

micheljansen wrote: post #210
vkoskiv wrote: post #170

Personal anecdote: I've used Vim for many years, but I never progressed much beyond the basics, because I almost never put much active effort into learning more advanced motions. About a year ago, I discovered the Helix editor, which has a (IMO) genius feature, where pressing a key to start a motion or other action pops up a little pop-up box that shows all the possible options. It just perfectly clicks with my brain…

Nice! I have memorised a lot of Vim actions over the years, but this would still absolutely help me a lot. I would love to have this for (Neo)Vim.

There's a plugin for that called which-keys

Re: Modeless Vim

#223

Post by alentred »

sfRattan wrote: post #135
beachy wrote: post #42

I attempted this within a few days of first being exposed to vi - 35 years ago. But since I was logging into different machines all the time I soon decided it was better to just use vi the way it came out of the box, modes and all. That philosophy has served me well over the years.

I had a similar realization early after first picking up vim in college: customization of any tool eventually hits a point of diminishing returns beyond which further alterations reduce your ability to use the tool in its default state . It's an insight I've found applies to almost any tool... From software to hardware and beyond. Master the default behavior of a tool, and then improve your effectiveness with customi…

I agree with this very much! I learnt it the hard way: my experience with many powerful tools, Vim included, was to learn the basics first, customize it to the point where you can't recognize it anymore, and then finally strip it down to the basics again, keeping only the configuration that doesn't prevent me from using the the raw features.

I used to manage complex "dotfiles" and scripts to configure a new computer, etc. I still technically do, but they are much more simple now. I just don't want to spend my time on configuring the stuff anymore, and appreciate the out-of-the-box experience much more. This by itself became a criterion when choosing new tools, frameworks, etc.

Re: Modeless Vim

#224

Post by mikl »

Modeless Vim. I guess that’s a bit like a peanut butter sandwich with no peanut butter. But if that’s what you want, more power to you.

Re: Modeless Vim

#225

Post by diggan »

neoden wrote: post #217
vkoskiv wrote: post #170

Personal anecdote: I've used Vim for many years, but I never progressed much beyond the basics, because I almost never put much active effort into learning more advanced motions. About a year ago, I discovered the Helix editor, which has a (IMO) genius feature, where pressing a key to start a motion or other action pops up a little pop-up box that shows all the possible options. It just perfectly clicks with my brain…

The main difference between Vim and Helix is that Helix is not hackable at all. Its configuration allows only very basic settings. It is impossible to change almost anything in its behaviour. So it focuses on being good out of the box. Whether it succeeds or not is for everyone to judge for themselves.

Seems at least extensability is on the mind of the Helix team:

> There’s two prototypes we’re exploring that could potentially exist side by side: a typed list/ML-like implementation for scripting and a Rust based interface for things that require performance. Could potentially run both in wasm but I’m personally a bit unhappy with how big wasm implementations are, easily several orders of magnitude compared to the editor

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/FAQ#how-to-write-...

So they're not avoiding making it extensible on purpose, seems they haven't found the right way to do it yet.

Re: Modeless Vim

#226

Post by kamray23 »

csdvrx wrote: post #54
arcanemachiner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in my day, when we pressed Ctrl+S, the terminal froze, and that's just the way we liked it. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/12107/how-to-unfree...

> Back in my day, when we pressed Ctrl+S, the terminal froze, and that's just the way we liked it. I don't think anyone needs (or even wants) the terminal to freeze on such a common shortcut in 2024. Personally, I have reclaimed Ctrl S for word delete (usually done by Alt-d)

Super helpful for basically anything in a terminal. Stuff is going to flow by pretty quickly or at least keep bumping the terminal every couple seconds, usually when you _least_ want it to do so. Reading off whatever your program emitted while it's pushing the terminal up every half a second gets really annoying without Ctrl-S. It's probably the most used terminal shortcut after Ctrl-C for me.

Re: Modeless Vim

#227

Post by diggan »

globular-toast wrote: post #167
jjcm wrote: post #37

Conceptually the reasons the author give for this (syntax highlighting and other features of vim outclass other terminal-based editors) make total sense. That said there's something absolutely defiling about this. It's like installing a V8 in a Tesla, or replacing the pumpkin in pumpkin pie. I love that it will make VIM more accessible for more people, but I hate how they do it. Kudos to the author.

Emacs runs in a terminal. Vim isn't installed everywhere, Vi is. If you're going to install an editor and a config you might as well just install Emacs.

> Vim isn't installed everywhere, Vi is

Doesn't most major distributions alias vi to vim nowadays? I think I've also come across vi being aliased to vim-tiny if I remember correctly.

Re: Modeless Vim

#228

Post by diggan »

saagarjha wrote: post #107
pvg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mention that as well - syntax highlighting is one example.

nano of course has syntax highlighting, so I’m curious where it falls short.

Does it have syntax highlighting for the same amount of languages as vim does, out of the box?

I just installed nano-7.2-1 and opened a HTML file with `nano test.html` and it opened without syntax highlight, I can see the point in authors endeavor if syntax highlighting out of the box is what they're looking for.

Re: Modeless Vim

#229

Post by hegzploit »

Hamuko wrote: post #103
jjcm wrote: post #37

Conceptually the reasons the author give for this (syntax highlighting and other features of vim outclass other terminal-based editors) make total sense. That said there's something absolutely defiling about this. It's like installing a V8 in a Tesla, or replacing the pumpkin in pumpkin pie. I love that it will make VIM more accessible for more people, but I hate how they do it. Kudos to the author.

For those who don't know, there are at least two different V8-powered Teslas. https://youtu.be/x-6kHjF1U1E?t=402 https://twitter.com/FthePump1/status/1738425546621825468

for a moment there, I was wondering why they'd install a JavaScript engine in a tesla.

Re: Modeless Vim

#230

Post by sheepscreek »

ploum wrote: post #219
vkoskiv wrote: post #170

Personal anecdote: I've used Vim for many years, but I never progressed much beyond the basics, because I almost never put much active effort into learning more advanced motions. About a year ago, I discovered the Helix editor, which has a (IMO) genius feature, where pressing a key to start a motion or other action pops up a little pop-up box that shows all the possible options. It just perfectly clicks with my brain…

There’s also Kakoune, which is very similar to Helix. See https://andreyor.st/posts/2023-09-20-why-kakoune/

Kakoune makes no claims to be Vim compatible though. The keystrokes are completely different.
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