81–90 of 92 posts
After a while I got fluent enough with vim to switch to NERDTree.
Btw, such a shame vimR (http://vimr.org/) wasn't around back when I started using vim, it looks awesome to learn vim-motions but still be able sometimes to use insert-mode and mouse if you have to get something done quickly.
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Would you be willing to share the HTML for your wiki page? Just looking at the table of contents, it seems really useful for those of us trying to learn vim compared to the normal cheat sheet that looks like a periodic table...
Sure! Here it is: http://pastebin.com/BbJv6sWX It's raw HTML, sorry for the format :) Note that I have the same kind of stuff for everything linux related: http://imgur.com/fI12YY5
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For me, I was always annoyed with how tedious it was to edit things. i.e, The gap between what I think vs what I have to do in the editor to get it done. This constant annoyance was what drove me to spend time and energy into learning it. I believe that if you don't care about it, you won't really benefit out of it. Because the whole point of switching to Vim/Emacs is to minimise the gap between what you think and ho…
Your example falls flat. Any text editor with regular expression support can do that... Do you have another example?
To do this one must select the letters foo somehow and then cause bar to be typed in their place. This can be done a number of ways in a "normal" text editor. For example, the person might double-click foo with the mouse to select the word and then type in bar. This does four things: 1. places the cursor in the location of foo; 2. select foo; 3. remove foo; 4. insert bar. In this example, there is one or two physical input context changes: from keyboard to mouse and back or maybe just from mouse to keyboard.
In vim, the physical input context never changes. The keyboard remains your context throughout. The person would 1. Position the cursor somewhere by foo (i.e. by typing a search expression like /foo); 2. type ci( which selects everything in the parenthesis, deletes and changes the context to input; 3. type bar (and probably 4. press the key).
I suspect that some people aren't bugged very much by the physical context switch and so the point of this is lost. Other people are bugged by it and struggle along until they find vi, emacs or the like.
Here are some more tips: - disable arrow keys - turn relative numbers on by default - force yourself to only move vertically using relative numbers - force yourself to only move horizontally using [fF,;]
Why would you want to disable arrow keys?
Whenever I start teaching someone vim, I always add this to their .vimrc:
inoremap
inoremap
inoremap
inoremap
The biggest thing that helped me to learn to use vim fluently by building up muscle memory (and making commands automatic) was playing Vim Adventures, a browser based adventure game that gradually teaches you vim commands: http://vim-adventures.com/ I haven't tried the full (paid) version yet, but the demo was enough to get me moving around text quickly. Now I finally understand why people use this crazy thing. :) Al…
The biggest thing that helped me was when I realized that it actually all makes sense. Every time you use vim and catch yourself repeating a command over and over (x, dd, hjkl) take a moment and think about if there is a more efficient way to do it by combining the commands you know. Let's say you need to delete everything from you current cursor position to the next paren in the current line, ok you know that: t ->…
The biggest thing that helped me to learn to use vim fluently by building up muscle memory (and making commands automatic) was playing Vim Adventures, a browser based adventure game that gradually teaches you vim commands: http://vim-adventures.com/ I haven't tried the full (paid) version yet, but the demo was enough to get me moving around text quickly. Now I finally understand why people use this crazy thing. :) Al…
The biggest thing that helped me was when I realized that it actually all makes sense. Every time you use vim and catch yourself repeating a command over and over (x, dd, hjkl) take a moment and think about if there is a more efficient way to do it by combining the commands you know. Let's say you need to delete everything from you current cursor position to the next paren in the current line, ok you know that: t ->…
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...
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The biggest thing that helped me was when I realized that it actually all makes sense. Every time you use vim and catch yourself repeating a command over and over (x, dd, hjkl) take a moment and think about if there is a more efficient way to do it by combining the commands you know. Let's say you need to delete everything from you current cursor position to the next paren in the current line, ok you know that: t ->…
Yes, but there's a difference between "makes sense" and "I can do it without thinking, so it is a lot faster than pressing ctrl + right arrow a few times" which then leads to "maybe I'll use vim instead of Sublime Text after all." :)
You just started learning vim and are moving around with hjkl and x-ing words letter by letter, then you learn about moving with w/W and b/B and repeating/combining commands (2w, 2b, ...), and the next time you're using it you think "wait a minute, d is delete, I use dd all the time, why wouldn't I just d2w to delete those 2 words, huh, it didn't work right, the cursor is in the middle of the first word, I have to bd2w", at least that's somewhat how I first started getting it. Once you understand something it's hard to forget and after a short time using it you don't really need think about it like you mentioned.
Time and again, these "how to coerce yourself into learning this hostile tool called vim" posts appear. I read them, and it sparks my interest. But usually, whats missing is part 2, which goes: "... and this is why it was so totally worth it". An no, just because it works over SSH and is installed on every server is not quite sufficient. Also, are you programming in a script language or a .NET or JVM behemoth?
"... and this is why it was so totally worth it". This is something that is difficult to explain, but absolutely clear to you once you have achieved some degree of efficiency. Muscle memory makes the editor disappear and let you focus, not on the keyboard, not on the menus, but on code itself. I suggest you watch some live-coding videos of people very experienced in the editor to get an idea (in this case the program…
Time and again, these "how to coerce yourself into learning this hostile tool called vim" posts appear. I read them, and it sparks my interest. But usually, whats missing is part 2, which goes: "... and this is why it was so totally worth it". An no, just because it works over SSH and is installed on every server is not quite sufficient. Also, are you programming in a script language or a .NET or JVM behemoth?
What I got from it personally is:
Most text editors now feel like there's not much to them, you rote learn the editor specific shortcuts, but they often don't have any meaning on their own so there is a tendency to forget them when they aren't used every day. Luckily the ones used most are often somewhat consistent across editors so it doesn't take much time to get to some level of proficiency with a new editor. Also you often have to use your mouse and sometimes arrow keys for efficient movement and text selection. This requires constantly moving one of your hands out of the typing position which seems a lot more distracting if you get somewhat used to "mouseless" text editing.
With vi(m), yes, you have to learn the shortcuts/commands but they kind of add together, almost every command or way to do something seems not only useful by itself but also expands your vocabulary and enables you to tell the editor what it should do in a more efficient way. In a way you are making up shortcuts on the fly all the time by composing commands you know depending on what you want to do, only most of the time (at least while editing text) you don't actually think about commands or shortcuts just like you don't have to think about ctrl+x and ctrl+v, it's just select, cut, paste.
tl;dr, my opinion
Is it worth spending the time and effort given the steep learning curve? If you don't already use vim at least some of the time and would have to force yourself into using it, I personally would say no. I think I still would have tried it but I don't know if I would have stuck with it once the novelty had worn off. I wasn't really unhappy with text editors, I just didn't like using vim the way I was using it. Also you end up adding "vim mode" plugins to every damn thing you type text into, IDE's (used for those behemoths), other text editors, web browsers, ...
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Vim is much more efficient. For example, within Tmux, one never needs to leave the terminal; with ST, there's a frequent switching cost which compounds over the course of a day. If one were to put Tim Pope up against an ST master, it's almost certain Pope would win.
I love the iTerm2 + tmux + vim + zsh environment. It takes a little time to figure out how to juggle the configuration for them, but once you do, it's super efficient.