Vim Creep • Hacker News Board

Re: Vim Creep

#41

Post by thetabyte » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 7:32 PM UTC

pfraze wrote: post #20

karmajunkie wrote: post #9

Can we all stop patting ourselves on the back for being vim badasses now? Yes, its a fantastic editor. Yes, its probably going to make you more productive. Yes, its every bit as capable as any other IDE or editor out there. No, it will not make you a better person. No, mastery of vim does not make you fart sunshine. No, it won't make you an enlightened buddha.

I think it's more about mastering tools with a high learning curve. It's our trade; it's fun to feel good about it.

I think that's something we as a community forget. It's ok to feel proud of being good with your tools. It is fun. As long as we don't turn it into a "holier than thou" situation, it's neat to have an editor that you have such mastery over that you can control blocks of text with keystrokes.

Note: I don't quite have it yet myself. I'm been using vim for about 6 months (with only 2-3 of active use) and I'm actually right on that cusp he mentions--where you are searching less and less, and only for more powerful and obscure commands, and things are just starting to all become extremely useful. It's beautiful.

Re: Vim Creep

#42

Post by anextio » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 7:33 PM UTC

xutopia wrote: post #34

crazygringo wrote: post #13

This feels like an article about a religion or cult, not a software program. I just don't get it. Ever since newer editors got block editing or multiple insertion cursors, and RegEx find & replace across multiple files, and searching filenames to open... I feel like I've already got everything I need! What am I missing out on? I don't feel like my text editor holds back my productivity. Using something like Sublime,…

You really have to sit down and see a vim user work to start to understand. In vim you don't just move around with arrows, then delete and then replace the text you want. What happens is you can use noun-verb associations to do things. For example on a line like this: var foo = "bar"; I could be at the beginning of the line and type the following keys to change the inside of the quotation marks: ci"baz In sublime I w…

Actually you can do it with:

-, , , baz

And considering you didn't have to press : beforehand, it can be just as fast.

I'm a vim user, but using it for something like Objective-C in place of the wonderful autocomplete in Xcode would be a totally dumb thing to do. It's simply not smart enough to improve my productivity, even with the slight speed increases with text-manipulation.

Re: Vim Creep

#43

Post by jamesaguilar » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 7:34 PM UTC

I've never found that symbols -> buffer is the bottleneck for me. Instead, it exists somewhere between problem -> symbols.

Re: Vim Creep

#44

Post by heretohelp » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 7:34 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #26

heretohelp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand vimmers, but I use Emacs and I can say that having your work environment be 100% programmable is pretty damned nice.

So what kind of stuff do you program inside of it? What kinds of problems do you solve? I mean, I've never really felt the need to program an add-on to text editor. I download syntax highlighting packages, and there are common macros like "remove trailing whitespace" already installed. Keyboard shortcuts can be changed in lots of editors and OS's. In the past, I've definitely been upset that a particular editor didn'…

https://github.com/bitemyapp/dotfiles

Highlights: a Python IDE with refactoring, inference, search, etc.

Some hacks for TRAMP which lets me remotely edit content on arbitrary servers transparently.

A Python repl.

A generic compliance checker for Python code.

An undo module that presents undo/redo history as a visible tree that you can traverse arbitrarily.

A git client that has some EXCELLENT features.

A function to dynamically reload my environment.

A macro for my python debugger injector.

Code to unhtml HTML content and a whitespace cleaner-upper.

An interactive environment to experiment with and test regex.

A mode for CSS that highlights hex-values with the colors they represent, making their properties visual.

An interactive HTTP REST client interface for testing HTTP APIs.

A clone of hacker-typer in elisp.

Modes for clojure, erlang, haskell, rust, etc.

And a nyan-cat for my progress bar.

Re: Vim Creep

#45

Post by a3_nm » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 7:35 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #13

This feels like an article about a religion or cult, not a software program. I just don't get it. Ever since newer editors got block editing or multiple insertion cursors, and RegEx find & replace across multiple files, and searching filenames to open... I feel like I've already got everything I need! What am I missing out on? I don't feel like my text editor holds back my productivity. Using something like Sublime,…

> I never think, man, if only Sublime did x, it would save me five minutes, twenty times a week!

You often don't notice how useful something is until you're used to it.

Re: Vim Creep

#46

Post by heretohelp » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 7:35 PM UTC

pfraze wrote: post #39

dpeck wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you were using the features of emacs/vim that make them awesome in their respective ways if you think the differences are subtle.

You may be right-- 6 months isn't much time. What should I look into?

Programming.

Re: Vim Creep

#47

Post by shazow » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 7:36 PM UTC

xutopia wrote: post #38

jdludlow wrote: post #21

My first week in college a distant relative of mine at the same school pulled me into the Sun lab. The sum-total of his instructions were: * This is how you log in. * This is ls. * This is cd. * This is man. * This is apropos. * Learn vi. * Have fun. What came from that 5 minute intro to Unix has been applied orders of magnitude more often than anything from 5 years of an EE degree.

Can you explain to me what apropos does?

This is why `man` came before `apropos`. :P

http://www.unix.com/man-page/Linux/1/apropos/

Re: Vim Creep

#48

Post by Wilduck » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 7:36 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #26

heretohelp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand vimmers, but I use Emacs and I can say that having your work environment be 100% programmable is pretty damned nice.

So what kind of stuff do you program inside of it? What kinds of problems do you solve? I mean, I've never really felt the need to program an add-on to text editor. I download syntax highlighting packages, and there are common macros like "remove trailing whitespace" already installed. Keyboard shortcuts can be changed in lots of editors and OS's. In the past, I've definitely been upset that a particular editor didn'…

I probably define ad-hoc macros 10-15 times a day These are for tiny things that save me a minute or two each time I use one. More than the time savings, though, is the sanity savings. I've it's rare now that I do any sort of repetitive editing task.

Also, you don't have to actually program the editor yourself to reap the benefits of a programmable editor. Let's be honest, most modern editors have mostly overlapping functionality. However, one of the benefits of emacs being programmable is that it's self documenting. I can find out how to capitalize a word problematically without having to go to google by using `M-x apropos RET capitalize RET`.

Re: Vim Creep

#49

Post by anextio » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 7:36 PM UTC

xutopia wrote: post #38

jdludlow wrote: post #21

My first week in college a distant relative of mine at the same school pulled me into the Sun lab. The sum-total of his instructions were: * This is how you log in. * This is ls. * This is cd. * This is man. * This is apropos. * Learn vi. * Have fun. What came from that 5 minute intro to Unix has been applied orders of magnitude more often than anything from 5 years of an EE degree.

Can you explain to me what apropos does?

It searches for a keyword in the manpages and tells you what page contains the text.

    $ apropos printf
    fmtcheck(3)              - sanitizes user-supplied printf(3)-style format string
    format(ntcl)             - Format a string in the style of sprintf
    fwkpfv(1)                - FireWire kprintf viewer
    fwprintf(3), swprintf(3), vfwprintf(3), vswprintf(3), vwprintf(3), wprintf(3) - formatted wide character output conversion
    printf(1)                - formatted output
    printf(3), fprintf(3), sprintf(3), snprintf(3), asprintf(3), dprintf(3), vprintf(3), vfprintf(3), vsprintf(3), vsnprintf(3), vasprintf(3), vdprintf(3) - formatted output conversion
    wprintf_l(3), fwprintf_l(3), swprintf_l(3), vwprintf_l(3), vfwprintf_l(3), vswprintf_l(3) - formatted wide character output conversion

Re: Vim Creep

#50

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 7:38 PM UTC

xutopia wrote: post #38

jdludlow wrote: post #21

My first week in college a distant relative of mine at the same school pulled me into the Sun lab. The sum-total of his instructions were: * This is how you log in. * This is ls. * This is cd. * This is man. * This is apropos. * Learn vi. * Have fun. What came from that 5 minute intro to Unix has been applied orders of magnitude more often than anything from 5 years of an EE degree.

Can you explain to me what apropos does?

[deleted]