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The vi family

lpar.ath0.com

81–90 of 198 posts

Re: The vi family

#81
post #54
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he doesn’t use any config it seems. No syntax highlighting, no line numbers, plain white text on dark background.

Exactly, it's wild! If anyone wants to have a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXBC85SGC0Q Correction, the driver is specifically for Apple Xserve front-panel

What is also wild is that the video has 2.5M views, very odd.

Re: The vi family

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have way more stuff to keep in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a text editor. I can't say I agree. To me this is equivalent to saying "I have way more music in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a piano". The tool you use for 8+ hours a day is extremely important and even small gains will p…

To continue the musical instrument analogy, I already master the piano and I am happy with it solving my requirements. Learning the guitar will be a great undertaking, and provide me no new songs to play. Hence, I will stick to my piano.

They didn't say they mastered the piano, though.

> I consider my vi/vim skills to be extremely minimalist subset, and probably horribly inefficient

Likewise, "I don't configure anything from the default" could be likened to playing an out-of-tune piano because you just can't be bothered. If you genuinely switch machines so often that configuration becomes a burden, sure, stick with the defaults -- but I think it's doing yourself a bit of a disservice if your reason is instead "I don't think it's worth spending time or mental energy on my tools".

Re: The vi family

#85
Helix, although a bit barebones by default, has been so much nicer for me recently than any of the vi editors so far. Love the default motions so much more, and having multi-cursor adds so much to the day to day experience.

Helix mode in zed is closest to my perfect text editor right now. Does everything helix does but with alt-up/alt-down to move lines, and a few other little things like that that you'd expect a modern editor to have.

Re: The vi family

#86
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never edited the default config much. But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/ . Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE. I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before. P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot…

I similarly thank the stars I ran into AstroNVim, which itself is based on LazyVim. Out of the box it has a lot of well integrated/just works pieces. It has a bunch of leader key things setup, and, crucially, a little visual navigator at the bottom of the screen. Going from powerful but invisible to having something I could see was such a help! I'd compare it to moving from tmux to zellij but I'm a pretty happy tmux…

Yeah, I have also been really impressed with AstroNVim. I tried using LazyVim for quite some time but I kept having a hard time getting used to it. Somehow I kept tripping up when trying to do things.

On one of my servers I needed to disable icons which AstroNVim handles very conveniently (https://docs.astronvim.com/recipes/icons/#disable-icons). After switching I noticed that using AstroNVim feels so much more natural to me. It's been a joy to use.

I think it might be because the defaults are less bespoke and it's just a bit leaner. The community packs have also been great for customization.

Re: The vi family

#87
post #6

Interesting the history is varied for such a simple tool. I am but a lowly mouse/GUI user so rarely have to dwell in a shell, but I learnt the basics of vi in my 1st year of university and never forgotten. Gotten me out of many a pickle being able to reliably edit a file quickly.

Neovim supports the mouse by the way.

I'm a GUI user too but using helix-mode (like vim-mode but IMO more intuitive) in my GUI editor, zed, gives me the benefits of both.

Re: The vi family

#88

I learned vi in '86 or so mid way through the CS course I did. Later on I used emacs and various other editors for many years. The weird thing is that the basic vi commands are hardwired in my brain - I could happily edit a file in vi but I'd be stuck if I had to use emacs (even though I actually used emacs for far longer)...

Interesting. Besides the navigation commands and the most basic of shortcuts, I've never been able to learn vi keybindings, even when I was actively trying. Half the time I still can't remember whether j or k is up.

Re: The vi family

#89

I consider my vi/vim skills to be extremely minimalist subset, and probably horribly inefficient, since they were developed to work accross a broad range of UNIX systems (SCO, Solaris, HP-UX, OSF, AIX) and I rarely add anything to my vim configs on top of that other than syntax highlighting. But I'd still rather use it than just about any other text editor, just for the simplicity of that muscle memory alone. I have…

> I have way more stuff to keep in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a text editor. I can't say I agree. To me this is equivalent to saying "I have way more music in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a piano". The tool you use for 8+ hours a day is extremely important and even small gains will p…

All pianos have the same interface, no?
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