Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Vi Rocks

why-vi.rocks

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 80 posts

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#31

Post by perryao »

greysonp wrote: post #20
andrewfromx wrote: post #7

i see people struggling, fighting with Intelli-J every day. I wish I could give them vim as a gift. All the extra stuff you think you can't possibly give up you don't need. I'm a professional text file editor. Vim is like playing the piano. I guess what I'm saying is learn to play the piano for real, and don't spend your life in a piano-player-helper IDE thing.

Vim is a fantastic text editor, but it is not an IDE replacement. Here's just a few IntelliJ features I use daily that Vim doesn't have: Go to declaration, find usages, rename method/class, change method signature, auto-import, shortcut to override method, easy-to-configure style rules, really good code completion, quick access to javadoc. I could keep going. Again, not hating on Vim. I use Vim keybindings in Intelli…

I think the future on this front is looking pretty bright. I use the awesome vim-go plugin which has support for the features you mentioned. And it's getting better as gopls (the language server) gets finalized. As the Language Server Protocol and the Build Server Protocol develop, I think we'll start to see Vim more closely resemble an IDE for many languages.

I use Vim because I love the history behind it and love knowing that investing my time in learning it is unlikely ever to go to waste. It's a solid editor and also helps keep me as close to understanding the ins and outs of my system and build tools. And for better or worse I just enjoy figuring out the best way to configure things exactly how I want them.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#33

Post by civility »

umvi wrote: post #14

Vim is like Dvorak. The cognitive burden for remembering which key maps to what is high unless you use it 24/7.

I have a friend who used to use Vi(m) with his Dvorak keyboard at home, and Emacs with his qwerty keyboard at work. He considered it an exercise for keeping his brain sharp. I don't think he still does it, but maybe.

Vim on Dvorak is insane, imho.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#34

Post by chimpburger »

greysonp wrote: post #20
andrewfromx wrote: post #7

i see people struggling, fighting with Intelli-J every day. I wish I could give them vim as a gift. All the extra stuff you think you can't possibly give up you don't need. I'm a professional text file editor. Vim is like playing the piano. I guess what I'm saying is learn to play the piano for real, and don't spend your life in a piano-player-helper IDE thing.

Vim is a fantastic text editor, but it is not an IDE replacement. Here's just a few IntelliJ features I use daily that Vim doesn't have: Go to declaration, find usages, rename method/class, change method signature, auto-import, shortcut to override method, easy-to-configure style rules, really good code completion, quick access to javadoc. I could keep going. Again, not hating on Vim. I use Vim keybindings in Intelli…

Vim was designed for editing _text_. It was not designed for semantic analysis of _code_. The semantic plugins for Vim are hacky addons.

Having Vim bindings in IntelliJ is indeed the best of both worlds.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#35

Post by civility »

anotherevan wrote: post #27
umvi wrote: post #14

Vim is like Dvorak. The cognitive burden for remembering which key maps to what is high unless you use it 24/7.

Does anyone use Vim on a Dvorak keyboard?

Funny you ask. While you were writing, I posted about a friend of mine who did that in a sibling message.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#36

Post by griffinheart »

umvi wrote: post #14

Vim is like Dvorak. The cognitive burden for remembering which key maps to what is high unless you use it 24/7.

Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi. [0]

I agree with you that if you don't use a specialist tool 24/7 you'll be slow, but that is expected vi optimizes for expert users not for novice users.

In the same way that if I don't use Photoshop and then just want to do something simple in it, it's going to take me a lot of time and am probably going to forget how to do it because I don't use it enough.

0 - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#37

Post by billfruit »

cwbrandsma wrote: post #6

I’ve learned some vi, and emacs, Visual Studio, VS Code, XCode, IntelliJ, and Android Studio. All the examples listed are pretty uncommon or trivial in any of the other IDEs (aside from the regex part, which is cool, but I never want to be in a place where I have to regex my code...ever). 90% of the time I’m doing simple code maintenance, with an occasional refactoring. And I know devs that swear by vi...they are dev…

I am writing this from emacs experience (some if not all these features are in vi as well), there are features from emacs that make a real difference in writing programs especially:

* Unlimited yanking from kill rings: ie pasting text from history of the clipboard.(This is one thing I have most difficulty with when switching from emacs to modern editors)

* Macro recording and playback : recording an arbitrary set of edit operations and then replaying them any number of times.

* two or more code frames/windows side by side, even displaying the same file Surprisingly modern IDE guis seems not designed for it, eclipse can do it but clumsily.

* Remote file editing: use the IDE tools to edit file residing on another computer.

* Column edits or rectangle edits. Selecting a vertical column or rectangle of text and copying, moving it to another place.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#38

Post by ausjke »

vim for command line, pycharm for python, webstorm for web, geany for everything else that needs a GUI, works great!!

used vscode for 2 years on and off, finally decided to part away two months ago and bought webstorm instead, the time spent on vscode with all the configuration and plugins and settingsync(which is not reliable) is way more expensive than webstorm's license fee(same as pycharm)

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#39

Post by phlyingpenguin »

anotherevan wrote: post #27
umvi wrote: post #14

Vim is like Dvorak. The cognitive burden for remembering which key maps to what is high unless you use it 24/7.

Does anyone use Vim on a Dvorak keyboard?

Yeah. It's really not too bad. It's certainly a little bit better if you take the ~4-10 lines to reconfigure a couple of keys. I map dhtn to hjkl and move d to j, n to l. It's pretty natural after that.

Re: Why Vi Rocks

#40

Post by ChuckMcM »

Since I "grew up" with vi I mostly use vi when using vim, but I do appreciate syntax coloring. I find it easier to scan comments that way and pick out constants.
Post reply on HN