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Vim 8.0 is coming

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Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#301
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the other hand, mice-based GUIs ARE a 100% replacement for CLIs. Really? I can automate a pipeline of GUIs? Please show me how I can automatically query a database, take that output, run complex data aggregation over those results combined with past results, send that to a remote server for storage, and email myself the result of the upload, using only a combination of GUIs. (Points deducted for anything that inv…

I think he was saying that a mouse-based GUI can display a terminal window in which one can run a CLI; thus a GUI is a strict superset of a CLI. That's true enough, although honestly I'm at a point in my computing where the G part of the GUI is pretty limited: my windows are all full-screen; the only clicking I regularly do is on links and tabs, and sometimes text (honestly, I'm trying to use the keyboard more for th…

> I think he was saying that a mouse-based GUI can display a terminal window in which one can run a CLI; thus a GUI is a strict superset of a CLI.

That's not strictly fair because running ncurses applications inside split tmux panes would give you a GUI-like UI inside a command line environment. Also some of the more esoteric WM's would provide that kind of functionality as well.

The main reason it's more common to run CLI inside a GUI is really just a matter of convenience.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#302
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's "we"? If someone reaches a maximum of productivity using an editor made in the 70's, who is anyone else to tell them otherwise? Preferred tooling for reaching maximum productivity is an inherently personal thing - you may do your best in emacs, the other guy in vi, yet someone else in Sublime3 on Windows. Nobody is qualified to make broad sweeping judgments as to what works best for everyone. A few try, and som…

People usually claim that one thing is more productive than the other without any real evidence. I think it's mostly just so we can stick with something out of familiarity. Or sometimes it's so we can switch to something else because we're bored. The "it feels right to me" argument just seems unbeatable (you can't argue with it without seeming like a jerk). For example, I might say that I'm super productive in IDE X,…

> I think it's mostly just so we can stick with something out of familiarity.

That's the single best reason to stick with something as personal as an editor. Emacs, for example, has all of the features of other IDEs but with a different interface. Want to single-step through a debugger? Got it! Refactor Java? Got it! Syntax highlight 1,373 file format you've never heard of? Oh, definitely got it!

Given that for literally any feature I've seen in other IDEs and wanted to try, Emacs has already had it for a decade, I just don't have an incentive to learn a wholly different workflow.

It could be true that I could make beautiful music on a guitar, but my piano skills satisfy my music requirements. I've played a guitar long enough to enjoy it and I see the appeal, but I like playing the piano more. Both would allow me to express my intent, but I can do it more easily with the interface I've been using for several decades. Why do people keep insisting I pick up a guitar?

BTW, I had this conversation with a manager once. He wanted me to use Eclipse for Python - Python! - development and kept giving me serious grief about my "ancient" Emacs setup. We was quite serious about it, too. I finally prevailed upon him to STFU and let me work with this logic: "Are you happy with my output? You are? Great. That means Emacs works for me. I'm done talking about this."

I wish that were an exaggeration, but I really had to have this conversation with a higher-up. If I'm using Notepad but still able to get my work done on schedule and meeting our quality requirements, then back off.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially Syntastic. It's always a pain when every ":w" of a Ruby file hangs for 5 seconds during syntax checking because Ruby is so abysmally slow.

Five seconds?! Mine hangs for at most half a second (and I thought that was a lot). I almost don't even notice it anymore.

I get long hangs (5 secs) when saving Ruby code.

I think it just takes a long time to load up all the gems rubocop relies on, then to process the syntax. I put the blame squarely on Ruby, not vim.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#304
post #10
post #4

I have vim, neovim and emacs (and spacemacs) installed. Right now I'm trying to get into emacs a bit more. What's interesting to me, and the reason I try to keep up to date with the latest changes for all four editors, is that it's been now, what, 25 years (?) since emacs and vim started "competing" and they still are. I guess we could be saying the same in 10 years about firefox and chrome, but it still is amazing i…

I became an heavy Emacs user as I could not find the comfort of Borland IDEs in UNIX, as I started to use it. Since I moved away from C++ into Java and .NET land, never felt the need to use them any longer. And nowadays, with Qt Creator, Clion, xCode, AppCode and VS, I also don't feel the need of them when I need to go back to C++. It is very good to know the basics from plain Vi, because there are still commercial U…

I too came from the Borland IDEs (I used to work at Borland).

Emacs is not a 25 year old developer experience, however. It's got an integrated package manager; responsive full-project text search (helm + your chosen grep tool) and path search (helm + projectile); good to excellent support for dynamic languages in particular (there's a nice synergy with e.g. ruby/pry).

It's not as strong with statically typed languages. There's no project-wide full-fat high fidelity symbol database support. There are a variety of projects to try and implement things along those lines (semantic etc.), but Emacs Lisp isn't the right tool to get the necessary level of performance. I'd love to see Emacs on Guile come to fruition; the ability to escape out into a language with less freedom to mutate scope (and thus optimize) would be a Good Thing.

I use Emacs (on Linux) to write JS, CoffeeScript, Ruby and C++; I use Eclipse to work with Java (though I'm considering switching to IntelliJ). Working with Java in Emacs is an exercise in pain, particularly since things like wildcard imports are frowned upon in the Java world. Eclimd is not good or reliable enough when used from Eclipse. Eclipse is deeply unpleasant to use compared to Emacs, which I'm able to easily customize to my preferences.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#305
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, then you have a GUI - menus/toolbars and after a couple of times use - you just remember the key binding usually specified along the label.

I'm not talking about superficial usage like that. I'm talking about productivity boosts like multiline edits, line swapping, cursor jumping over blocks, and more advanced tricks. Also about where to do all those little tweaks to the configuration you need to google for or ask a coworker about to get a hold of. Those are not discoverable with any GUI.

> Those are not discoverable with any GUI.

Are you sure? I can _search_ in my IDE's preferences for available keybindings and all kinds of other stuff.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#306
post #10
post #4

I have vim, neovim and emacs (and spacemacs) installed. Right now I'm trying to get into emacs a bit more. What's interesting to me, and the reason I try to keep up to date with the latest changes for all four editors, is that it's been now, what, 25 years (?) since emacs and vim started "competing" and they still are. I guess we could be saying the same in 10 years about firefox and chrome, but it still is amazing i…

I became an heavy Emacs user as I could not find the comfort of Borland IDEs in UNIX, as I started to use it. Since I moved away from C++ into Java and .NET land, never felt the need to use them any longer. And nowadays, with Qt Creator, Clion, xCode, AppCode and VS, I also don't feel the need of them when I need to go back to C++. It is very good to know the basics from plain Vi, because there are still commercial U…

People have already given a lot of answers, but there's one thing that annoys me specifically about Visual Studio and Xcode.

Every so often, I come across a cool open-source project that I would like to build and tinker with, only to find that it can only be compiled if the Visual Studio solution file or XCode project file from the repo is used.

Or let's say, it could be compiled probably, but replicating all the logic hidden inside the solution/project is ridiculous.

That's not to say that you can't have the best of both worlds. For example, CMake can generate both Makefiles and VS solutions.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#307
post #254
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Weird things would go wrong and I had no idea how to fix them. My experience with Emacs/Spacemacs without having significant knowledge of lisp/elisp/Emacs debugging. I want to like Emacs, but my Vim environment feels so much more "solid".

Same here. I have emacs init.el file that I'd like to tinker with from time to time but every time I try to make switch I feel like I'm using a system consisting of thousands of moving parts which constantly break. It's completely awesome that you can change anything in emacs however you want but time and time again I realize that I'd rather have a rock solid editor with small api that let's you customize few things.

Write one, then. I did. It's not hard. Mine's about 7K lines of code and it's the perfect text editor for me.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially Syntastic. It's always a pain when every ":w" of a Ruby file hangs for 5 seconds during syntax checking because Ruby is so abysmally slow.

Five seconds?! Mine hangs for at most half a second (and I thought that was a lot). I almost don't even notice it anymore.

Let's say these are five perceived seconds. The number might or might not be skewed by my passionate hatred of Ruby.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#309
post #10
post #4

I have vim, neovim and emacs (and spacemacs) installed. Right now I'm trying to get into emacs a bit more. What's interesting to me, and the reason I try to keep up to date with the latest changes for all four editors, is that it's been now, what, 25 years (?) since emacs and vim started "competing" and they still are. I guess we could be saying the same in 10 years about firefox and chrome, but it still is amazing i…

I became an heavy Emacs user as I could not find the comfort of Borland IDEs in UNIX, as I started to use it. Since I moved away from C++ into Java and .NET land, never felt the need to use them any longer. And nowadays, with Qt Creator, Clion, xCode, AppCode and VS, I also don't feel the need of them when I need to go back to C++. It is very good to know the basics from plain Vi, because there are still commercial U…

The fact that I can customize VIM to suit my needs with modern methods and plugins that bring same kind of functionality found in more modern editors/development envs to the powerhouse that is VIM.

For example, these are some of my favorites:

https://valloric.github.io/YouCompleteMe/ - Code completion for C/C++ and other languages

https://github.com/ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim - TextMate style ctrl+p fuzzy file finder

https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree - Tree explorer plugin for browsing files

https://github.com/vim-airline/vim-airline - Customizable status line for showing all kinds of useful info about currently edited file

https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive - Git wrapper that works together with airline

https://github.com/mhinz/vim-startify - Shows your most recently edited files and favorite files on the start screen

https://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish - Smart text replacement, easily replace eg. getColor, GetColor -> getTransparency, GetColor and so on

And this combined with the fact that I can do all of this from the tip of my fingers, without having to touch the mouse, with high customizable commands that go into my muscle memory, there is no substitute for VIM for me.

I've worked with Eclipse, Xcode, Visual Studio. They have some pretty nice features, like interactive debugging that are hard to replicate with Vim, but I'm more of a "print debug message" kind of guy anyway, so that doesn't bother me.

The biggest hinderance with Visual UIs is that I have to use the mouse, and that sucks. So much faster to do text selection, copying, replacement, renaming and so on straight from the keyboard, once you get used to it.

I'm still discovering active new ways to customize VIM after over 15 years of using it.

Re: Vim 8.0 is coming

#310

Dropped the support for MS-DOS. It was too big to fit in memory. This is a little surprising since the latest version of Emacs still supports MS-DOS[1]. If anything, you'd expect Vim to be the smaller and faster choice but it seems this isn't the case anymore... Then again, I don't really understand the culture of all the customisation/plugins/etc. around text editors; part of the reason why I originally chose Vi(m)…

My head turned around. I read it like Vim loads MS-DOS, and I thought, why would it do that? But then it occured to me dat this means Vim can run under MS-DOS. It's been so long since I've used MS-DOS as OS, I can't imagine it anymore. To me it's just a program that is run by another something.

Last time I used MS-DOS productively was in 2008, for a lab course while studying physics. The specialized equipment they used came with a software that ran under MS-DOS, and from that point, they "never changed a running system". I've been told that this particular PC has still been in operation at least one year ago.

I also remember that we had a problem with transferring the resulting data for analysis, because the physics department had just been equipped with new PCs that did not have floppy drives anymore.

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