There's been a number of "anti-vim, use a real ide(TM)" posts coming into my feed lately and I don't get why. Do people really get buttmad about this? I switched from vscode to vim as I found it to be largely much faster in getting around when I started my new job, some people find the opposite. A ok. Why do people try to force us into these largely closed solutions? ( Mainly it's vscode, which has a real EEE threat)
I've never gone for vi(m), even after roughly 25 years of using Linux now. I'm not trying to force you into anything, certainly not anything closed. I used NEdit until its lack of utf-8 and ancient GUI library started causing trouble. Then I used Slava Pestov's JEdit, which was wonderfully extensible and portable. Now I use vscode, which is just so outrageously well made that even electron and Microsoft can't scare m…
Vim Anti-Patterns That Cause Beginners To:Quit
71–80 of 135 posts
Re: Vim Anti-Patterns That Cause Beginners To:Quit
#72I’ve used vi(m) since 1989. I still use it lots. A while ago though, I made an interesting realization/admission (at least for me). Vim is great for small files (because it’s ingress is so quick and fluid and universal) and pretty good at editing/tweaking existing content. But I have found it painful for original authoring of large original content. So if I need to rough out the first go at a python/elixir/c code bas…
That's funny, I'll actually do the opposite
I like to rough out code in Vim, and clean it up before I run it in vscode. Vim is so fast and I can get the majority of the structure out quickly, and than I can mouse around in vscode and make sure my arguments to functions are in the right order and that sort of thing
Re: Vim Anti-Patterns That Cause Beginners To:Quit
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The great thing about vi(m) is that it's always there . SSH'd into some random server and need to edit some random config? vim. And Sublime is vim with a user-friendly-ish GUI wrapped around it.
>The great thing about vi(m) is that it's always there. SSH'd into some random server and need to edit some random config? vim I hate that, I ssh in, then maybe I want to edit cron and I am hit with vim(someone changed the simple nano with it), in the past you had no choice then google how to quit vim but now it will tell you how to do it(I ssh and change config files 1 or 2 times a year). I never learned how to quit…
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Re: Vim Anti-Patterns That Cause Beginners To:Quit
#74The best tip imho is to use `vimtutor`. It's installed on every machine that has vim (to the best of my knowledge) and provides an interactive tutorial that builds on itself to teach vim knowledge. It's really cool, if you haven't checked it out just fire up a terminal and give it a play.
Re: Vim Anti-Patterns That Cause Beginners To:Quit
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never gone for vi(m), even after roughly 25 years of using Linux now. I'm not trying to force you into anything, certainly not anything closed. I used NEdit until its lack of utf-8 and ancient GUI library started causing trouble. Then I used Slava Pestov's JEdit, which was wonderfully extensible and portable. Now I use vscode, which is just so outrageously well made that even electron and Microsoft can't scare m…
How can you tell modal editing is bad without having used it? You said you've never gone for vim in 25 years, how then can you know what model editing is like? Because you read some behavioral psychology textbook? Your comment is by far the most ignorant one I've come across on hackernews. Take my advise, go ahead and try out vim for a few weeks. Then even if your opinions don't change at least you'll have an ounce o…
I'm pretty sure they meant that they tried it multiple times, but didn't like it.
Same with me. I try and get on the vim hype train. seems like a great idea, but i can never 'get' vim.
Re: Vim Anti-Patterns That Cause Beginners To:Quit
#76There's been a number of "anti-vim, use a real ide(TM)" posts coming into my feed lately and I don't get why. Do people really get buttmad about this? I switched from vscode to vim as I found it to be largely much faster in getting around when I started my new job, some people find the opposite. A ok. Why do people try to force us into these largely closed solutions? ( Mainly it's vscode, which has a real EEE threat)
I've never gone for vi(m), even after roughly 25 years of using Linux now. I'm not trying to force you into anything, certainly not anything closed. I used NEdit until its lack of utf-8 and ancient GUI library started causing trouble. Then I used Slava Pestov's JEdit, which was wonderfully extensible and portable. Now I use vscode, which is just so outrageously well made that even electron and Microsoft can't scare m…
> But modal editing is just a bad idea. We've known since the 70s.
My understanding was that the UX studies around modal editing showed it was hard for new users, which isn't quite the same thing as "bad".
Personally I think what really works about vim for me is the composition of action and motion in a sort of language.
Re: Vim Anti-Patterns That Cause Beginners To:Quit
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bringing up the old mouse makes this conversation sound so dated - as I said, I use a trackpad. Specifically, like millions of others, I work on a MacBook Pro with an incredibly precise trackpad right under the keyboard. I move my hand to and from that trackpad in about 0.1s, and I can click on anything I want in less than half a second. "Rich intentions in a few keystrokes" doesn't sound competitive with that IMO.
It's all about uninterrupted experience, I don't want to move my hand anywhere off the home row and then move back again, it feels clunky. Regarding competitiveness, with a bit of get used to, you can muscle memory things like: "remove content inside this bracket (), or "", or block {} and place me into insert mode so I can start typing new content" in 3 keystrokes. I don't see how searching manually for start and en…
For the record, the "3 keystrokes" are "ci" (mnemonics: "Change In") + the delimiter. Also works with "w" and "W" to change the word under cursor.
Re: Vim Anti-Patterns That Cause Beginners To:Quit
#78How would you distinguish between an exhaustive list of vi anti-patterns and a vi tutorial?
Re: Vim Anti-Patterns That Cause Beginners To:Quit
#79There's been a number of "anti-vim, use a real ide(TM)" posts coming into my feed lately and I don't get why. Do people really get buttmad about this? I switched from vscode to vim as I found it to be largely much faster in getting around when I started my new job, some people find the opposite. A ok. Why do people try to force us into these largely closed solutions? ( Mainly it's vscode, which has a real EEE threat)
I’ve went through various editors and IDEs in past years. 2 years ago, I started using vim for exact same reason as yours. Nowadays, I use both vscode and neovim but mostly neovim as it’s faster for me. The problems I see are - - not everyone is comfortable with customizing their editor. - the meaning of bare-minimum features is different for everyone. - some of us try hard to learn vim and then give up, declaring it…
Does (neo)vim offer a similar debugging experience? Visually stepping through code and setting break points and stuff?
I like vim's code navigation, but I miss the autocompletion features of bigger editors. Can you make vim tab complete like sublime? Last I tried, it was never as "one key to rule them all", but required some additional finger-fu and attention. Also moving selected code around (so I can make engine noises) is a must.
Something about VS Code just feels wrong, but it's pretty much exactly enough of an "IDE" for me. Tho, I strongly dislike the project based file management. Would like to have a solid vim setup instead.
Re: Vim Anti-Patterns That Cause Beginners To:Quit
#80There's been a number of "anti-vim, use a real ide(TM)" posts coming into my feed lately and I don't get why. Do people really get buttmad about this? I switched from vscode to vim as I found it to be largely much faster in getting around when I started my new job, some people find the opposite. A ok. Why do people try to force us into these largely closed solutions? ( Mainly it's vscode, which has a real EEE threat)
IME, it's because when you view vim as just another element in a list of "things that let me write code into files", where sibling elements are "IntelliJ", "vscode(ium)", etc, then vim comes off as looking like "gedit but with keyboard shortcuts and no discoverability, oh but you can research and install and configure a million plugins with no overarching design cohesion and you also have to maintain and update them". As opposed to many other editors/IDEs that are designed holistically and more intentionally, and have a much higher "just works" and discoverability factor.
From that angle, yeah, it's probably fair for people to look at vim and go "what even is this".
I think the right way to look at vim is "it's a powerful editor that is installed on almost every linux box everywhere that is deeply customizable and extremely flexible".
Seldom a week goes by where I'm not ending some ridiculous shell pipeline incantation with "| vim -" to dump it into vim and then do further investigation there (with regex, find/replace, etc etc support).
So, I consider myself a vim fan, but I don't use it for day-to-day coding but I still consider it an important tool in my toolbox.
I do think there's a crowd, too, for whom customizability for the pure sake of customizing is a big feature. And that's fair too. But I think that really tends toward being for amusement rather than productivity gains. Which is fine! Lots of software is for having fun, and having fun adjacent to being productive and make it easier to be productive. So I'm really not bashing anyone here, promise!