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Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

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Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#91

vim overhyped as an editor? It might be overhyped as a programming tool (you won't write 2x the same amount of lines in a day; you will not be 5x more productive), but as an editor, it deserves every single bit of hype that it has. No other editor stands next to vim. A lot of people dislike editors. It's fine. There are a million tools out there that help people become more productive programmers. You might enjoy Int…

Yet the ancient Evil* from the elder world that is Emacs plots to consume Vim and absorb it's functionality. When that day is fulfilled what other editor will be able to stand?

* http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#92
post #9

The great advantage of vim is that it forces you to use only the keyboard. No mouse at all! Mouse is slow. Keyboard is fast (once you get used to it).

I've wanting to move keyboard keys onto the mouse for decades. The closest I've got is with a Razer Naga Epic - the gaming mouse with the 12 thumb buttons: F5 Up F2 Left Down Right Tab Del Backspace Enter Space ESC This speeds me up greatly. Especially in mixed GUI/keyboard input situations.

That's beautiful.

I might just get one to try out something similar. I'm thinking it might also be useful to have a different mode on the mouse that have the buttons map to keys on the numpad for calculations.

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#93
Eventually, I'm hoping for some keyboard/mouse hybrid like this to catch on:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1666150716/keymousetm-t...

I didn't end up backing it though because I didn't want to dump $250 on a v1 product would likely have many issues to sort out. That and the ergonomics of the typing didn't look that great.

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#94

Here's the thing: when you're coding, how much time is spent on reading vs writing? For me it's probably 90/10. Since most my time is spent concentrating on understanding code, the last thing I want is an editor that forces me to consciously think about text operations. "d[downkey]4" might be theoretically more efficient, but I spend way less cognitive energy holding down the shift key and pressing the down arrow 4 t…

>Since most my time is spent concentrating on understanding code, the last thing I want is an editor that forces me to consciously think about text operations. "d[downkey]4" might be theoretically more efficient, but I spend way less cognitive energy holding down the shift key and pressing the down arrow 4 times. The point is well taken, but don't forget that for most people that downside of increased cognitive press…

I found I had to go a bit beyond the settings that OSX's native manager allow for to get the key repeat that I was after. Karabiner has a setting for adjusting it properly in ms (so you ~ match other machines). would recommend.

https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#95
post #38
post #31

I've tried switching to VIM (from few years of using Sublime) few times already, but failed every single time: bare VIM is too dysfunctional to my taste and ways of working with text editor (missing tabs, file/folder treee view, easy switching documents, easy visual copy/paste and so on, missing code expanding/completion...). Last time I tried spf-vim[0] but while it looked 'cool' (it has colors, it does code complet…

One thing I'd stress: Start with Vim for side tasks, not to replace Sublime. Once you have the basics down, you can then layer on the IDE features (addons like Ag, NerdTree, CtrlP) that make Vim comparable to what you are used to in Sublime. I'm happy to act as a coach for you (and anyone else), if it's helpful. If you have a good plan of attack, you can get Sublime-like functionality pretty quickly.

Thanks for the coaching offer, its really nice of you! However, you could consider writing a set of ramping up tutorials on using vim/spf13 and publish them somwhere, so that more than one person at a time could use your hard work.

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#96

Here's the thing: when you're coding, how much time is spent on reading vs writing? For me it's probably 90/10. Since most my time is spent concentrating on understanding code, the last thing I want is an editor that forces me to consciously think about text operations. "d[downkey]4" might be theoretically more efficient, but I spend way less cognitive energy holding down the shift key and pressing the down arrow 4 t…

I think your example is somewhat badly chosen. If I had to delete four lines, I'd most likely mash dd until done, or maybe Vjjjd. It would be completely automatic and not require reaching for numbers or the arrow keys, making it significantly faster and more comfortable as well. I find that vim is extremely good for reading code, since navigating around a file is very easy (and I am in no danger of accidentally editi…

And in true TMTOWTDI fashion, I'd add that depending on what the four lines were (in relation to my cursor and their content and, frankly, whatever pops into my head first), I'd probably do 4dd, or d4j, or d] or d} (if the final line was the end of my current sentence or paragraph) or d2] if it was two sentences.

My favourite bit is that I use which one pops into my head first. If I think "until the next occurrence of 'nded?'" then that's what I do, with d/nded?. If I think "up to line 438" then I can do d438g. It reduces the number of decisions I have to make, which increases my mental stamina.

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#97

Eventually, I'm hoping for some keyboard/mouse hybrid like this to catch on: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1666150716/keymousetm-t... I didn't end up backing it though because I didn't want to dump $250 on a v1 product would likely have many issues to sort out. That and the ergonomics of the typing didn't look that great.

Personally, I think this one looks better: http://www.combimouse.com/

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Recently, I switched to i3[0] and Vimium[1] and it's just wonderful. Now I'm way faster than before and hardly ever use the mouse. [0] https://i3wm.org [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...

As a slight aside, how did you choose i3 over the other tiling window managers? I chose xmonad at one time, but it was more or less by chance --- someone else used it that I knew, and so I tried it. But I haven't actually compared any.

I used to use ratpoison - I very much like its mode of having a tree of key bindings hung off a single root, so that there's nothing I can't send to my applications. The fact that it largely works like screen/tmux is also quite nice.

More recently I had occasion to get xmonad working sufficiently like ratpoison to be usable. I expect my setup will grow in interesting ways in the long term, but it's still fairly minimal.

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