this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Users of Vim and similars, what exactly makes it useful compared to other text editors? How much time do you suppose you save when working with it? (programming.dev)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'd like actual examples instead of "I work faster", something like "I can move straight to the middle of the file with 7mv" or "I can keep 4 different text snippets in memory and paste each with a number+pt, like 2pt", things that you actually use somewhat frequently instead of what you can do, but probably only did once.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Bouncing on parentheses with % makes structured files easy to get around in.

That's something I wasn't aware you could do in vim. % jumps to the next parentheses character, whether ( or )? Does it work with brackets and curly braces too?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

So far as I'm aware, yes. As a C engineer, it's also useful for jumping from #ifdef to #endif .

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Not just the next parenthesis that appears, It jumps to the matching one that opens or closes the one under the cursor. Hitting it repeatedly bounces back and forth around the text that pair of parentheses enclose.

It works not only with brackets and curly braces, but also with opening and closing tags in XML etc.

I feel like other editors must have an equivalent feature, though. I'd say the fact that vi can put such a specific action under just % rather than some nasty chord or mouse operation is what really makes it shine here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

It generally works with a wide variety of delimiters. There's a widely used plugin to make it work with even more, including language-specific keyword pairs.