Obligatory
How to Exit Vim
361–370 of 409 posts
Re: How to Exit Vim
#362Maybe don’t do the reboot way on Solaris...
Re: How to Exit Vim
#363In the opposing vein, as an Emacs user the best configuration I ever made was to rebind C-x C-c to execute-extended-command instead of kill-emacs. It was way too easy to (even accidentally!) kill emacs with a sweep of a finger. And I probably use a few hundred execute-extended-command calls for each kill-emacs (which I now have to type manually as 'C-x C-c kill-emacs' - no problemo). A similar optimisation was with t…
Emacs is so dynamic and easily configurable, that people can actually rebind a lot of things when their colleague go to the bathroom as a prank. Just open a scratch file, enter some s-expressions, evaluate them, then kill the buffer.
Would serve the victim right.
Never leave your unattended keyboard and screen unlocked.
Re: How to Exit Vim
#364First step to quit vim is to accept that you are vim user. Here are some tips: Try to limit yourself to one vim session per day, then one session per week, and so on. Try to replace some Vim sessions with Emacs. Buy notebook with keyboard without Esc key. Install an OS without Vim. Use mouse.
> Use mouse
I am ethically opposed to cruel and unusual treatment of *Nix users.
You can pry my tiling WM and Tridactyl/qutebrowser away from my cold, dead hands.
Re: How to Exit Vim
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a college class in which students are supposed to learn something new, that seems like a perfect example of a situation where you should be forced to do something outside your comfort zone. I don’t interpret that as the college professor saying this is actually the best way to code, just that forcing students to struggle through it is a learning experience.
> It’s a college class in which students are supposed to learn something new Unless the central thrust of the course is supposed to be the mechanics of a particular dated editor, the restriction described seems to be a distraction from rather than an aid to what the students are supposed to be learning. It doesn't make any more sense than a social science course where the deliverables for most assignments are essays…
> particular dated editor
I wonder how you feel about age discrimination. Old != bad.
I started using Vim when I was 14; I was the only one in the class who wasn't using an IDE. Vim (perhaps combined with a language server if you're okay with the complexity) runs circles around bloated IDEs like IntelliJ/VSCode. Unix combined with a tiling WM is the best IDE in existence.
The professor in question is likely doing the students a service by showing them the advantages of minimalism and function-over-form over the trend of bundling an OS with every "app". Many students today only feel comfortable using software that saturates their synapses with colors and animations; having to use Vim for a semester forces the good ones to realize that maybe, just maybe, function should come before form. Maybe 10k lines of C or POSIX shell solves a problem better than a VC-backed Electron app.
To continue your analogy, WordPerfect and DOS, unlike Vim, aren't better than today's tools. What would be an improvement is LaTeX/BibTeX for writing essays. Once I realized how much work was automatically done for me--from Chicago-style footnotes/endnotes and auto-generated ToC from headings, the time I spent formatting my papers dropped to zero. I would absolutely incentivize students to use these tools over "modern", bloated word processors.
Re: How to Exit Vim
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
C-a is the worst default keybinding ever, since like, going to the beginning of a line is one of the most common operations.
In the rest of the universe, going to the beginning/end of the line is mapped to the Home/End keys (fn+left/fn+right on Macs), and I do prefer it when my thing does things in ways that roughly correspond to how the rest of the universe does them if there's no compelling reason to do otherwise.
> (fn+left/fn+right on Macs)
When I used Mac in 2009 to 2012 it depended on the application you were using:
Some used fn+left/fn+right, some used CMD+left/CMD+right and I think ctrl and/or alt + arrow keys were an option too.
ctrl a/ctrl e would work everywhere I think but I didn't use those as they didn't work with shift to select to the start or end of the line.
As a keyboard type of person this was a major part of what drove me away from Mac despite its many advantages :-(
Re: How to Exit Vim
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know, hjkl was first introduced in games and later used in vim because we don't have to move our hands far away from the keys. Feel free to correct me If I'm wrong.
https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys
One neat thing this misses is that in ASCII, H is left, CTRL-H is backspace (which goes left while doing a thing); J is down, CTRL-J is linefeed (which goes down while doing a thing, sorta). It ends there, unfortunately - I don't see a good connection between vertical tab and up or formfeed and right.
Re: How to Exit Vim
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emacs is so dynamic and easily configurable, that people can actually rebind a lot of things when their colleague go to the bathroom as a prank. Just open a scratch file, enter some s-expressions, evaluate them, then kill the buffer.
Would serve the victim right. Never leave your unattended keyboard and screen unlocked.
At some place I worked there was a policy that a small prank was allowed if the workstation was not locked when someone left. I'd almost recommend that policy for some places.
Acceptable pranks would be things like:
- innocent videos (annoying videos for toddlers etc)
- change Spotify playlist from rock to childrens songs or rickroll or something
- open MS Paint and draw something (those pranks weren't necessarily small, we got three huge monitors side by side on those workstations)
- etc
Unacceptable pranks:
- anything that wasn't possible to revert in a hurry
- anything a customer couldn't see (we were on display :-/ )
At another place I know someone sent a mail to the team from someone elses account that they would bring cake the next day.
I once burned myself by doing what I thought was the obvious thing: leaving a message in a text editor and locking the machine. Turns out for some reason he couldn't unlock it after it had been locked that way and he needed to leave the campus to have IT at the main site unlock it. (When he locked it he always did it by closing the lid instead of through the system menu.)
Re: How to Exit Vim
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have tried to start using vim so many times and failed. Even this year I thought to start using vim. Daily I open vim once try to do something new with it. Although I don't have much of hope that I will start using it an soon.
I finally started using Vim sort of by force, and am already becoming proficient with it after a few hours (and liking it). The reason was that my ISP sent me a cheap Chromebook for free, and I've started using it for coding during my commute (and relegating my old laptop to my music studio). A few days ago there was a ChromeOS update that seems to have killed the ability to connect to code-server (a VS Code server)…
You might want to check out https://vim-adventures.com/
I very much enjoyed the first level. Already quite proficient in vim, I balked at the cost of the full game - but it might well be worth it in your situation.
Re: How to Exit Vim
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Had the same thing when I was studying CompSci. Ended up spending more time configuring vim than doing the work I was supposed to do. Even did the completely pointless exercise of making custom syntax highlighting for the pseudocode language we had to use.
Once configured vim works fine. I probably spend 1-2 hour/day in vim for my personal projects but haven’t configured anything in months.
I think I had most things working properly within the first few days, but kept customizing and changing settings/fonts/themes/plugins.
Mostly procrastinating by pretending I was "Being Productive"