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Modeless Vim

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Re: Modeless Vim

#251

Post by cassepipe »

wruza wrote: post #242
cassepipe wrote: post #239

My usual comment on any thread touching vim, as an answer to all hypothetical comments talking about how vim never clicked : Remap the Escape key to CapsLock else you will never like vim (provided you are a normal person) It's the most important key and you should punctuate all your inserts with it. So it'd better not be the key that's the furthest away from your fingers. The reason that's the case is an historical a…

“Doesn’t mean it’s good” doesn’t mean it’s a problem either. Also, people prone to remapping already have their Ctrl there.

Life can be beautiful we don't have to suffer because it's already there.

Remapping takes less than 5 seconds in MacOs and Linux. 2 minutes in Windows. And you only have to set it up once.

Also my left pinkie never misses CapsLock and I don't even have to think about it. Can't say that's the case for Ctrl+[ which I have used extensively for one year. I am really happy I switched.

Re: Modeless Vim

#252

Post by carb »

wruza wrote: post #242
cassepipe wrote: post #239

My usual comment on any thread touching vim, as an answer to all hypothetical comments talking about how vim never clicked : Remap the Escape key to CapsLock else you will never like vim (provided you are a normal person) It's the most important key and you should punctuate all your inserts with it. So it'd better not be the key that's the furthest away from your fingers. The reason that's the case is an historical a…

“Doesn’t mean it’s good” doesn’t mean it’s a problem either. Also, people prone to remapping already have their Ctrl there.

Yeah I use Ctrl far more often than Esc as I'm usually navigating code and reading it vs writing it, so Caps Lock -> Ctrl is more valuable.

Additionally, I use Ctrl outside of vim very frequently as I keep my terminal key bindings native, which means all of the command line control patterns use Ctrl (jump to front, jump to back, cut (forwards/backwards), move by word, reverse search, etc etc)

I'm still of the opinion that Ctrl+[ like the OP said would be mentioned is the best because (1) it's native and (2) it uses both hands so it's almost as fast as hitting a single key and requires no hand contortion.

- 14 year exclusive vim user

Re: Modeless Vim

#253

Post by carb »

cassepipe wrote: post #251
wruza wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Doesn’t mean it’s good” doesn’t mean it’s a problem either. Also, people prone to remapping already have their Ctrl there.

Life can be beautiful we don't have to suffer because it's already there. Remapping takes less than 5 seconds in MacOs and Linux. 2 minutes in Windows. And you only have to set it up once. Also my left pinkie never misses CapsLock and I don't even have to think about it. Can't say that's the case for Ctrl+[ which I have used extensively for one year. I am really happy I switched.

What do you do when you need Ctrl in non-vim contexts?

Re: Modeless Vim

#255

Post by camtarn »

cassepipe wrote: post #239

My usual comment on any thread touching vim, as an answer to all hypothetical comments talking about how vim never clicked : Remap the Escape key to CapsLock else you will never like vim (provided you are a normal person) It's the most important key and you should punctuate all your inserts with it. So it'd better not be the key that's the furthest away from your fingers. The reason that's the case is an historical a…

> Remap the Escape key to CapsLock else you will never like vim (provided you are a normal person)

I guess I'm not a normal person then? Never bothered doing the remapping and I've been an enthusiastic Vim user for a decade.

Re: Modeless Vim

#256

Post by jayflux »

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.

I think Helix have gone the right way around with their priorities. They've started by making the right things built-in that most developers would need on a day-to-day basis. It's already better than configuring vim/neovim in that regard as it just works out of the box. An example is having Tree-Sitter and LSP already configured, so you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality.

The customizability/hackability will come later, they're working on extension support plus other stuff, but I think for most of their users, this isn't the number 1 priority.

I guess their target users are those who just want to get up and running on a modal editor without spending too much time in Lua or trying to get plugins setup.

Re: Modeless Vim

#257

Post by MSFT_Edging »

camtarn wrote: post #255
cassepipe wrote: post #239

My usual comment on any thread touching vim, as an answer to all hypothetical comments talking about how vim never clicked : Remap the Escape key to CapsLock else you will never like vim (provided you are a normal person) It's the most important key and you should punctuate all your inserts with it. So it'd better not be the key that's the furthest away from your fingers. The reason that's the case is an historical a…

> Remap the Escape key to CapsLock else you will never like vim (provided you are a normal person) I guess I'm not a normal person then? Never bothered doing the remapping and I've been an enthusiastic Vim user for a decade.

Smacking the escape key constantly is probably my favorite part of using Vim. It has me smacking escape all the time to see what it does in other apps. I love when esc is just mapped to a "stop doing that" or "go back".

Also doing embedded stuff, I find the caps lock key nice for when typing out a few defines or macros.

Re: Modeless Vim

#258

Post by MantisShrimp90 »

I think it's funny how much emotional energy gets invested into any (neo)vim posts. But the energy is mostly people that never learned vim and feel super insecure about it.

I'm not going to make the same mistake of judging this. If you are someone who has always hated vim and never want to touch it, go for it, this might make your day easier on some machine if you can load this repo really quick (although as others have noted you would need to ftp the repo onto a machine over ssh to make this work).

As someone who is a neovim enjoyer, you are allowed to not like (neo)vim, I don't want to hear you bitch about the editor you don't want to use. If you're a vim user who has this bad habit of shaming people for their editor choice, STOP! It gives us all a bad name whenever you judge people just because they don't enjoy the vim life, just like emacs it's closer to a lifestyle than a tool and if people don't want to invest the time they have the right to make that choice.

The world is no longer dominated by vim and it really has become an optional skill for new programmers.

Re: Modeless Vim

#259

Post by [deleted] »

cassepipe wrote: post #239

My usual comment on any thread touching vim, as an answer to all hypothetical comments talking about how vim never clicked : Remap the Escape key to CapsLock else you will never like vim (provided you are a normal person) It's the most important key and you should punctuate all your inserts with it. So it'd better not be the key that's the furthest away from your fingers. The reason that's the case is an historical a…

[deleted]

Re: Modeless Vim

#260

Post by livrem »

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 used to think like that, but 10 years ago I decided to create a git-repo for my .emacs.d and started configuring beyond the most trivial settings (and including all dependencies in the repo too). Diminishing returns? Not sure how to measure. Editor configuration was never anything I did because I thought it would somehow save time, as some seem to imply, but rather just about removing sharp edges and making the experience of editing files nicer. With everything a quick git clone away it is rare that I have to work without my configuration.
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