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Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

viemu.com

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Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#41

Post by Symmetry »

austintaylor wrote: post #31
dchest wrote: post #21

I use vim for about a year or more, and I like it, however I'm still having trouble with copying and pasting tiny fragments of text. Maybe someone can help me out with this? 1) If I yank a line with yy, pressing P or p will insert the text into a new line. 2) If I go to visual mode and select a region, yank it with y, then press p/P, it gets it inserted into the current line. That is, vim preserves new lines. What I…

Whether it pastes a newline or not depends on whether you yanked one. I guess this is what you mean by "vim preserves new lines". Don't all editors work this way? If you want to yank a line character-wise, you would do something like ^y$. I have Y mapped to y$ for this sort of thing. You cannot yank a substring of a line line-wise. That doesn't really make sense. I typically open a new line with o and then paste in i…

Vim's preserving of new lines is more awesome than that of lesser editors. If you have

  This is a test
      ^
with your curser at the carrot, and you type 'yyp' you will get

  This is a test
  This is a test
Rather than

  This This is a test
  is a test

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#42

Post by un1xl0ser »

First, you understand how and why it is modal. Then you learn simple commands for movement and editing.

Then you learn all the meta-commands. All of these building blocks are only limited by your creativity of combining them to get what you want done. The more commands and tricks you know, the more you can slice and dice text, code, logs, whatever inside your editor (without leaving it).

I guess it's just a Unix/neckbeard thing. This is how the rest of Unix is designed, so why not the editor.

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#44

Post by [deleted] »

dchest wrote: post #21

I use vim for about a year or more, and I like it, however I'm still having trouble with copying and pasting tiny fragments of text. Maybe someone can help me out with this? 1) If I yank a line with yy, pressing P or p will insert the text into a new line. 2) If I go to visual mode and select a region, yank it with y, then press p/P, it gets it inserted into the current line. That is, vim preserves new lines. What I…

[deleted]

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#45

Post by Riesling »

Whenever I am using a program other than vim I feel clumsy.

Plugins for Eclipse, Chrome and so on will only bring you so far. The other way around, namely turning vim into a multipurpose IDE does not satisfy my needs. One needs to admit that some features (refactoring support in Eclipse for example) cannot be matched by the available vim plugins. I know there are other solutions, like eclim, but I am looking for something more universal (think of using vim bindings in your email client).

This is why I have been thinking about implementing a vim emulation layer recently, so that every program can profit from vim keybindings. Basically this would be implemented as some form of keygrabber that would translate vim specific commands into regular ones.

Does anyone know of related pre-existing projects one could use as a reference. A quick google search did not deliver any results for me.

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#46

Post by gbog »

brown9-2 wrote: post #18

One of the great things about vim is that even if you use it as your regular editor (I use MacVim), you tend to learn something new every time you read a new article. Today I learned about the '.' command. Also, old discussion on same article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151637

You might like , as well, it repeats the last move.

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#47

Post by Riesling »

drblast wrote: post #19

Don't ever start using vi. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have vi key bindings will give you fits and make you cry. Learning vi is your standard process of enlightenment and elation followed by a lifetime of disappointment. Think about how you'd feel if you ate the best meal of your life at age 13, and the restaurant where you ate it went out of business the next day. You'll be…

I feel your pain. This problem needs to be solved.

See my post below[0]. Your input would be appreciated.

[0]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3543011

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#48

Post by jng »

electrichead wrote: post #39

I know this will be an unpopular comment, but my whole problem with it is actually the attitude of those that use it. After reading the article, I was really impressed and imagining all the ways it could help me after what, 8 years of coding into an IDE; and then I got to this: "Do whatever you want. Don't learn it if you feel it's too much effort just for nothing. Learn emacs instead. Or stay in your IDE using a lou…

I'm the author of the article. Yes, the ending is anticlimatic, but the only reason is that I didn't want to "push" it on people. I just wanted to share my views. I thought many people would complain of fanboyism if I finished with a push to use it.

I guess you just can't please everyone.

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#49

Post by graywh »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #22
adient wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I installed Arch, it did not. Also checking Scientific, it does not (assume also RHEL/CentOS).

Arch definitely doesn't. sometimes I accidentally type vi and am confused for a few seconds why things dont work right. Luckily an alias will fix it.

Is it a case where vi is a version with the tiny feature set and vim has a larger (huge) feature set?

Re: Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

#50

Post by Shanewho »

Riesling wrote: post #45

Whenever I am using a program other than vim I feel clumsy. Plugins for Eclipse, Chrome and so on will only bring you so far. The other way around, namely turning vim into a multipurpose IDE does not satisfy my needs. One needs to admit that some features (refactoring support in Eclipse for example) cannot be matched by the available vim plugins. I know there are other solutions, like eclim, but I am looking for some…

Here is one in C# https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/
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