What Is Vim?
blog.jonas.foo
What Is Vim?
1–10 of 179 posts
Re: What Is Vim?
#2I guess. Wake me up when you can enable Emacs mode in vim.
Re: What Is Vim?
#3I guess. Wake me up when you can enable Emacs mode in vim.
"A dream to some ... a nightmare to others!" --Merlin, from Excalibur
;-)
Re: What Is Vim?
#4Helix uses a selection-first action model: you select the word/paragraph/whatever you want to perform an action on, then you change/delete/whatever on that selection.
I think this is more intuitive than the "verb object" model Vim uses: if you get your selection wrong in Vim, you then need to undo the action and try again. In Helix, I can see what I am about to manipulate before I make the action.
I think at this point Vim wins out for being so ubiquitous, but I wish the Helix model took off first.
Re: What Is Vim?
#5Helix uses a selection-first action model: you select the word/paragraph/whatever you want to perform an action on, then you change/delete/whatever on that selection. I think this is more intuitive than the "verb object" model Vim uses: if you get your selection wrong in Vim, you then need to undo the action and try again. In Helix, I can see what I am about to manipulate before I make the action. I think at this poi…
That's what I really enjoy about helix (and kak) - a different approach to the modal editing paradigm.
I'm still stuck on neovim for now, but progressively I'll make my way to helix I think.
Re: What Is Vim?
#6Helix uses a selection-first action model: you select the word/paragraph/whatever you want to perform an action on, then you change/delete/whatever on that selection. I think this is more intuitive than the "verb object" model Vim uses: if you get your selection wrong in Vim, you then need to undo the action and try again. In Helix, I can see what I am about to manipulate before I make the action. I think at this poi…
I use both in vim - if the selection is tricky use v or V to define the selection first, but most of the time "verb object" makes sense to me since that's how english works (tho could see it being unintuitive for non-SVO languages). "delete the next word" or "change inside the parentheses" roll off the brain and into the keyboard
Re: What Is Vim?
#7Helix uses a selection-first action model: you select the word/paragraph/whatever you want to perform an action on, then you change/delete/whatever on that selection. I think this is more intuitive than the "verb object" model Vim uses: if you get your selection wrong in Vim, you then need to undo the action and try again. In Helix, I can see what I am about to manipulate before I make the action. I think at this poi…
I remember thinking roughly the same thing when I was a regular vim user. This was a long time ago now, so I forget the details, but from memory I used to use visual mode quite a lot, meaning I'd get to use the motion commands to select the region of interest first and then choose the operation to perform on it.
The typical vim model is a bit weird, but once I got practised with it it was actually quite surprising how much complicated stuff I could do purely by sight. But while the muscle memory aspect got me further than I'd have expected, it did only get me so far. Selecting the region first always seemed like it'd be the better way in general, being no worse when your fingers can do it automatically, while being better in the case where you're having to think about what you're doing.
Re: What Is Vim?
#8Learning Vim early on had a high return on investment for this reason. Years later, I'm still able to benefit from the same muscle memory in modern tools, e.g. Obsidian.
It should be said, though, that most implementations are simplified rewrites of Vim's core functionality. When you use a tool to achieve a sense of "flow", it can be grating for the editor to behave in subtly different ways from expectation, or discover an important feature does not work at all. Also, there tends to be limited, if any, support for Vim plugins.
In the modern era of Vim and NeoVim, it's possible for such tools to use the real version via network protocol, but integration is easier said than done. So far it's mostly been Vim GUI wrappers that leverage the capability rather than independent editors.
I still use Vim mode where I can even if it's a shadow of the real Vim experience. It makes life easier to use the same muscle memory on every shell, editor, and command-line, and not have to worry about learning every new app's idiosyncracies.
Re: What Is Vim?
#9> There's a Vim mode in every single mainstream code editor out there.
And they’re always frustratingly incomplete and/or buggy. Some motions will be unimplemented, or will behave incorrectly, especially with regards to boundaries around whitespace inclusion or exclusion in a motion. Things you added to Vim and got used to are unavailable, and so your ysa") to put parentheses around the string your cursor is on just doesn’t work. (Lack of vim-surround definitely gets me frequently.)
In VS Code, it maintains its own undo stack, and the interactions between the two undo stacks are terrible and terribly frustrating—yet doing without might be even worse, because they behave very differently.
And too often in a browser context, ^W will close your tab, losing data, rather then being inhibited and erasing the last word, as it should. That one is practically unforgivable in a Vim mode, yet common. That, more than anything else, will make me avoid a Vim mode.
Re: What Is Vim?
#10Agree that Vim is a language to talk to your computer, but it's not necessarily efficient. Vim is famously an imperative editor: You have to tell Vim the sequence of steps to perform. Clicking your mouse on a position on the screen is declarative: You declare you want the cursor here. With Vim you have to imperatively walk the cursor to where you want to go, or god forbid use something like easymotion.