31–40 of 124 posts
Vim is a regular expression system hooked to a 1970s user interface. If you need to apply regular expressions to text files, vim is useful. I used vi to write code for years, but that was decades ago. There's been some progress since the 1970s.
"a regular expression system hooked to a 1970's user interface" + a whole lot of awesome plugins! Incidentally, there is nothing inherently wrong with 1970's user interfaces. My car still has a steering wheel just like cars did in the 1970's. And there is a reason for that. Because it works really well.
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Way more useful (for me anyway) is mapping Capslock to ESC. It works with any vi anywhere as long as you are using your main machine to connect. Also with inoremap don't you have to wait for the letter j to show up until you type your next character? That would drive me crazy. Edit now that I have actually looked at the article: Yes, you can map it to Control but for me it's an awkward place to put a modifier. What i…
Was just about to post this. Though I map Caps-Lock to Esc through xmodmap so it works everywhere instead of just in Vim.
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You're doing yourself a disservice. Intellij (PyCharm) has a vi plugin. Whatever extra stuff you give up from regular Vim, you gain an order of magnitude of productivity using a development environment that is "smart". Think about what PyCharm does for you and what Vim doesn't. Vi(m) is a model, not an implementation. I wish people would stop handicapping themselves with very bad implementations. Intellij, Visual Stu…
> Vi(m) is a model, not an implementation. I think you are talking about modal editing, vi is an application, vim is another application.
The point I was trying to make (which irked somebody) is that the modal vi keybindings in modern IDEs is more important than Vi(m) itself.
Vim is a regular expression system hooked to a 1970s user interface. If you need to apply regular expressions to text files, vim is useful. I used vi to write code for years, but that was decades ago. There's been some progress since the 1970s.
First, efficiency of bandwidth over an ssh connection. You might think, "Oh but there is tons of bandwidth on the internet today". However, I actually use vim to pair program with people in the UK while I'm in Japan. Vi commands can easily deal with variable latency and still give good performance because you are almost always in command mode. Instead of arrowing down to some character, I simply tell the editor where I want it to go using a language with a grammar. I have very happily coded all day with 300+ ms latency in Vim. For me this is a killer feature that is painful with any other input system. (vi is even better at this because it reduces the number of repaints to a bare minimum).
The second feature is very much related to the first - the use of a grammar for describing what you want the editor to do. With most editors, you press a key and it does something small and specific. With vi/vim you describe things that you want the editor to do with sentences.
This is a great example of the difference between ease of use and ease of learning. vi/vim is very difficult to learn well (or at least it takes a lot of time and practice). But it is arguably much easier to use once you have that learning. It's like the difference between "Pick up glass. Drink beer." and "Move hand. Move hand. Move hand. Grab glass. Lift glass. Move hand. Move hand. Move hand. Tilt glass. Drink beer".
Sure, it's not for everyone, but it's clearly not reasonable to say that the state of the art has improved in these respects. I can think of no other editor that even attempts to solve these problems. If you know of some, I'd be happy to learn of them.
Thanks for this tutorial. I'm at Level 1 having switched from an IDE (PyCharm) and I find this helpful. Any reason why you use Pathogen vs Vundle for managing plugins? Does it even matter?
You're doing yourself a disservice. Intellij (PyCharm) has a vi plugin. Whatever extra stuff you give up from regular Vim, you gain an order of magnitude of productivity using a development environment that is "smart". Think about what PyCharm does for you and what Vim doesn't. Vi(m) is a model, not an implementation. I wish people would stop handicapping themselves with very bad implementations. Intellij, Visual Stu…
Also, Minority Report.
http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/vim-essential-plugin-easy...
My issue with getting better at vim is that I've gotten to the point where I'm comfortable moving around text, copying/pasting, and everything I would normally do with a mouse. I know vim is so much more than that, but it's one of those things where "you don't know what you don't know" and because of that, I don't have the incentive to continue learning. Hopefully this post will inspire me to incrementally advance my…
* find/replace/regexes
* registers and macros
* vim settings (spell, list, highlight, number, wrap)
* the plugin ecosystem
* editing multiple files simultaneously (splits, buffers, moving between them)
* folds
Anyone else want to chime in with stuff I've either forgotten or don't know I don't know?
Which plugins do people find valuable? EasyMotion was recently recommended to me: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/vim-essential-plugin-easy...