this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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If I wanted to hear about what's good about Vim, should I:
a) ask what's good about vim
-OR-
b) assert blindly that there is nothing good about vim so fanboys will come crawling out of the walls tripping over each other to tell me how I'm wrong?
Doesn't matter we will tell you either way.
* I use "intuitively" here in a way that not merely stretches, but outright abuses the definition of the word.
Thank you for telling me all this neat stuff! :D
I think I get what you are intending to imply by the word "intuitively"; it's that it eventually becomes as reflexive and fluid as touch-typing itself.
Gosh you make it sound almost like you play Vim like an instrument more than use it...!
Honestly that sounds cool ^_^
Exactly like that!
It's also another source of the many "I can't exit Vim" jokes, because it is now genuinely disorienting for me to try to edit text without Vim key bindings.
That's a great analogy. It does very much feel that way.
It is pretty cool.
Wether it's really worth the learning curve is probably unique to each person that tries it. But for folks who need to edit a lot of text a lot of the time, it's pretty great.
It's intuitive if your previous editor was ed(1) and you're using an ADM-3A-like keyboard.
Exactly! Ha!
You shouldn't talk about vim at all! Just write that vscode is the most flexible code editor.
Don’t use Microsoft’s version. Use Vscodium! :)
Yeah. And VsCodium with NeoVim is fantastic.
I've seen vscode fill up home directories unnecessarily when run on the machine directly as well as remotely!
IMO vscode is a perfect example of recent software that looks great from a features pov but horrible from an efficient implementation pov. I loved it until I hated it.
It does have a vim plugin, so it's a perfectly fine editor
tl;dr: Run
vimtutor, learn vim, enjoy lifeIt's extremely powerful, for mostly the same reason that it's incomprehensible to newbies. It's focused not on directly inputting characters from your keyboard, but on issuing commands to the editor on how to modify the text.
These commands are simple but combine to let you do exactly what you want with just a few keypresses.
For example:
w is a movement command that moves one word forward.
You can put a number in front of any command to repeat it that many times, so
3wmoves three words forward.d is the delete command. You combine it with a movement command that tells it what to delete. So
dwdeletes one word andd3wdeletes the next three words.f is the find movement command. You press it and then a character to move to the first instance of that character. So
f.will move to the end of the current sentence, where the period is.Now, knowing only this, if you wanted to delete the next two sentences, you could do that by pressing
d2f.Hopefully I gave a taste of how incredibly powerful, flexible, yet simple this system is. You only need to know a handful of commands to use vim more effectively than you ever could most other editors. And there are enough clever features that any time you think "I wish there was a better way to do this" there most certainly is (as well as a nice description of how).
It also comes with a guide to help you get over the initial learning curve, run
vimtutorin a console near you to get started on the path to ~~salvation~~ efficient editing.I'm not against that,
But if ctrl+f doesn't let me type a search term then I'm going to scream
The war could have been avoided if user had the option to easily rebind any key/action
It's been awhile since I've bothered to remap a key in Vim, but adding this to
.vimrcshould do it for you:I started with a bunch of these to let me keep using existing muscle memory while training new.
Is there a .vimrc that already maps all the standard notepad++ keybindings in one go ?
You may find someone who has one, but I just did the ones I found myself missing as I encountered them.
I tried someone's all-in-one
.vimrc, but it broke too many community recipes while rebinding a bunch of shortcuts that weren't in my muscle memory anyway.I kept adjusting my
.vimrcas my muscle memory transitioned. So having less to fiddle also made it easier for me to keep my.vimrctuned to my muscle memory.For example, I was using
/instead ofCtrl+Fbecause I liked it better within a month or two.There are better editors to learn if your goal is to not learn vi.
In vi, search is not only used for searching, but also for navigation. Demoting search from an easy-to-reach single key to a difficult-to-press chorded key combination breaks one of vi's core philosophies, natural editing flow, and will significantly reduce your enjoyment and efficiency using the editor.
To add to your line of query, what if I don't give a shit about writing code and I just use Linux as a casual laptop user? I've never looked at vim or emacs, I use Kate and OnlyOffice
Depends on how much you write. At some point the efficiency gain is probably worth learning vim anyway, but Kate is a nice editor and does the job.
I just like vim, it feels nice.
What kind of things would we be gaining efficency for? Markdown? It seems graphically to be a very spartan program. If I'm only writing text, what value would I gain from learning vim versus a graphical text editor that incorporates markdown and page design?
If you want to do document editing, then neither vim nor Kate are editors that do that. They are for editing text. You can write markdown, if you like, and then use pandoc or other tools to convert that to a printable document. I always use LaTeX if I need a pretty output, but that also has somewhat of a steep learning curve.
What you gain is the ability to manipulate text very efficiently. It's hard to describe, but it kind of feels like a lower overhead protocol of communicating to the computer what i want it to do to the text compared to "normal" editors. Again, if you only rarely write stuff, it might not be worth it, but it feels great
For just regular text to be consumed by humans, it's not that great, you probably want a word processor.
It shines when you do a lot of more structural editing, stuff like "change all quotation marks on this line to be single tick", "copy everything inside these parentheses and paste it after the equals sign", "make the first word on the next five lines uppercase", these are the type of things vim make easy that are not easy in other editors.
So it's great for code and config files. Markdown is borderline. You can have a setup that lets you live view how the markdown renders while editing in vim, so it can be pretty good, but the advantage might be a bit dubious.
Using Neovim with qmv had been amazing for when I needed to standardize seasion and episode numbers/titles for my jellyfin library.
Vim has been around long enough that I've found anything I want to figure out how to do has been discussed many times on various places around the internet and have yet to fail to find what I'm looking for with a search.
They're both fine choices.