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Commanding your text editor

blog.peepcode.com

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Re: Commanding your text editor

#3

Post by eitland »

Regarding the point about autocompletion: If autocompletion is needed don't use vim or emacs, -use Netbeans or eclipse, both excellent, free (both ways) and open source.

vim is great and I use it all the time but not for Java and PHP where the IDE support is so good that it really makes a difference.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#4

Post by emillon »

eitland wrote: post #3

Regarding the point about autocompletion: If autocompletion is needed don't use vim or emacs, -use Netbeans or eclipse, both excellent, free (both ways) and open source. vim is great and I use it all the time but not for Java and PHP where the IDE support is so good that it really makes a difference.

Autocompletion does not have to be context-aware to be useful. "Dumb" completion of words in the current buffer, or filename, is quite useful IMHO.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#5

Post by confluence »

eitland wrote: post #3

Regarding the point about autocompletion: If autocompletion is needed don't use vim or emacs, -use Netbeans or eclipse, both excellent, free (both ways) and open source. vim is great and I use it all the time but not for Java and PHP where the IDE support is so good that it really makes a difference.

I concur - Java dev off Eclipse can be a complete nightmare. I used to be a hard core vimmer/command liner - until I realised 2 things:

1. The vast majority of things that I did were repetitive and were already solved in other environments

2. Knowing the minutiae of the stuff that I know now does not improve my skills at all - production matters for shipping, minutiae matters for interviews. Best way to get a job is to produce so much - you don't have to interview :D

Now I just use whatever is the most widely deployed, best supported environment for each language (e.g. Visual Studio for C++ and Eclipse for Java).

The one thing I have kept is my vim foo by using IDE specific plugins :D. Pick your tools carefully - and don't fall into the "true final solution trap" that people try to sell you.

Choose the right tool for the right job.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#6

Post by exDM69 »

eitland wrote: post #3

Regarding the point about autocompletion: If autocompletion is needed don't use vim or emacs, -use Netbeans or eclipse, both excellent, free (both ways) and open source. vim is great and I use it all the time but not for Java and PHP where the IDE support is so good that it really makes a difference.

> If autocompletion is needed don't use vim or emacs, -use Netbeans or eclipse, both excellent, free (both ways) and open source.

Vim also contains excellent autocompletion (several kinds, actually, most powerful of which is the omni complete) but it's not restricted to one language. It may, however require you to install your language specific plugins. Vim ships with C and C++ mode, which requires you to build a ctags database of your source code. In addition you might want to add cscope for source code navigation.

Eclipse has autocomplete perhaps for a handful of languages but Vim has support for autocompletion in tons of languages.

In addition to omni-complete, vim can have an user defined completion (C-x C-u), which is handy to set to do syntax completion (set completefunc=syntaxcomplete#Complete). Vim ships with tons of syntax files, which are used for completion and syntax highlighting. This is not super useful for programming, but is excellent for different kinds of configuration files, so you don't have to memorize (or look in the manual) for the configuration options you use.

And I'd rather use Vim without autocomplete than have to deal with Eclipse. Thankfully I don't have to.

Emacs has great autocomplete too.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#7

Post by jrajav »

The "keys instead of notations" idea is neat, but it makes it a little more difficult to visually parse, and more importantly, it ignores other keyboard layouts. For such a small article it's not a big deal, but if this were a larger list, I would definitely go with a more abstract representation.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#8

Post by tubs »

If you are deleting a word in order to correct a mistake (ie/ by typing it back in) it's usually best to `cw` or `cb`, which will leave you in insert mode after the delete.
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