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What!?! vim is the most unintuitive application I have ever used. Having to understand that y means yank (and then what yank means) is one of the very reasons

What!?! vim is the most unintuitive application I have ever used. Having to understand that y means yank (and then what yank means) is one of the very reasons it is not intuitive. it's like the masonic editor, don't know the right handshake or password you don't gain entrance to productivity.

CaptSpify 10y ago
I love vim, but it really is the anti-thesis of intuitive design. I think that's actually it's strength, in a weird way.
- cgag 10y ago
  Yeah, I'm not here for intuitive, I'm here for power.
  - beefield 10y ago
    I find it somehow odd that often many people equal good UI with easy to learn UI. They _can_ be the same, if we have an application that is rarely used more than once, but for an application that is used often and a lot, they typically seem to be very different animals. Notepad has probably the easiest UI to learn while being as probably the crappiest text editor for any serious use with any significant installation base ever created. Vim is the other way round. It is extremely easy to do something with data using Excel. For any serious data management you are doing much better working with a database.
joemi 10y ago
> vim is intuitive ( -ish?) once you understand what each character means That is a much different statement than simply saying "vim is intuitive", which is the statement it appears you're arguing against. I doubt there's anyone in the world who would attempt to make such a bold claim as that. I've found the "vim is intuitive once you understand what each character means" claim to be pretty accurate. Before learning what the keys did, it seemed like a laughably impossible-to-use program, but after learning what the keys do, it feels very natural and composable. Sure, some of that is due to muscle memory, like hjkl for movement, but a lot of that are things like "p for paste", "d for delete", "n for next", and so on. Those, to me, seem like very intuitive mappings.
- boomlinde 10y ago
  That it can be "intuitive once you understand what each character means" seems a bit oxymoronic to me. A design is intuitive or it isn't. That you can figure out a complex and cluttered design and use it to your advantage over time by trawling through manuals and guides doesn't make it intuitive. Your intuitive understanding of the design may improve, but that applies even to the most brain breaking concepts, so it's hardly a useful way to look at it.
  - naibafo 10y ago
    Well, some basic commands would be intuitive but aren't anymore, because most applications use very different keys or because our vocabulary changed. I.e. y(ank) and p(aste). However, once you know them they do make more sense then ctrl-v for paste (was that chosen because v is next to c on the keyboard?). What I think becomes really intuitive once you understand the basic commands however is the combination of them. If you know that 'dd' deletes a line, it is very intuitive to me that '4dd' deletes 4 lines.
  - joemi 10y ago
    Others have explained it better in threads near this one than I could, but the short response to this is that intuitiveness is personal and contextual.
    - boomlinde 10y ago
      Sure, it's personal to some extent, but have you ever seen anyone sit down with a Vi/Ex/Ed-like for the first time and intuitively figured out how to work it? It's also contextual for sure, but for the word to be meaningful at all in a UI design sense, one surely must draw the line somewhere before the required context is to know the editor from experience or by having studied its documentation. Otherwise it's an absolutely useless thing to point out for the sake of discussion. Anyone can use complex things intuitively given some exercise. That doesn't make things like theoretical physics particularly intuitive in themselves.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
city41 10y ago
vim has an initial hurdle of being extremely unintuitive. But once you start learning the vim "language", you find it builds on itself and intuitiveness increases a lot. For example d is the delete command and w is the "move by word" command, so dw is "delete word". / is the search command, so /foo searches for the first instance of foo in the document. You can intuitively figure out that d/foo is "delete everything until the first found foo", and that is exactly what it does.
- Arnavion 10y ago
  >You can intuitively figure out that d/foo is "delete the first found foo" Makes more sense to me than "delete everything until the first found foo" at any rate. Intuitiveness is subjective.
  - city41 10y ago
    You wouldn't think that if you used vim. I don't want to turn these comments into a vim tutorial so I simplified it a bit. But in the framework of vim, d/foo and what it does is totally intuitive and easy to figure out on your own. With vim when you learn a new command it applies to all the movements you know and vice versa. EDIT: rereading my comment, I should have said "/foo moves to the first instance of foo in the document" to correlate how / is a movement just like w is a movement (w is "move by one word")
    - Arnavion 10y ago
      >EDIT: rereading my comment, I should have said "/foo moves to the first instance of foo in the document" to correlate how / is a movement just like w is a movement (w is "move by one word") Yes, then it makes much more sense.
chongli 10y ago
Eh, the cockpit of a 747 isn't intuitive either. Intuitive is orthogonal to powerful.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
"Intuitive" is anything that happens to fit into the preconceptions you have. Vim is older than most software you've ever used, therefore seems unintuitive. If you were born 20 years earlier, it would be perfectly intuitive to you.
- weavie 10y ago
  Indeed. Vim is a lot more intuitive than Ed.

CaptSpify 10y ago

I love vim, but it really is the anti-thesis of intuitive design. I think that's actually it's strength, in a weird way.

cgag 10y ago
Yeah, I'm not here for intuitive, I'm here for power.
- beefield 10y ago
  I find it somehow odd that often many people equal good UI with easy to learn UI. They _can_ be the same, if we have an application that is rarely used more than once, but for an application that is used often and a lot, they typically seem to be very different animals. Notepad has probably the easiest UI to learn while being as probably the crappiest text editor for any serious use with any significant installation base ever created. Vim is the other way round. It is extremely easy to do something with data using Excel. For any serious data management you are doing much better working with a database.

joemi 10y ago

> vim is intuitive ( -ish?) once you understand what each character means That is a much different statement than simply saying "vim is intuitive", which is the statement it appears you're arguing against. I doubt there's anyone in the world who would attempt to make such a bold claim as that. I've found the "vim is intuitive once you understand what each character means" claim to be pretty accurate. Before learning what the keys did, it seemed like a laughably impossible-to-use program, but after learning what the keys do, it feels very natural and composable. Sure, some of that is due to muscle memory, like hjkl for movement, but a lot of that are things like "p for paste", "d for delete", "n for next", and so on. Those, to me, seem like very intuitive mappings.

boomlinde 10y ago
That it can be "intuitive once you understand what each character means" seems a bit oxymoronic to me. A design is intuitive or it isn't. That you can figure out a complex and cluttered design and use it to your advantage over time by trawling through manuals and guides doesn't make it intuitive. Your intuitive understanding of the design may improve, but that applies even to the most brain breaking concepts, so it's hardly a useful way to look at it.
- naibafo 10y ago
  Well, some basic commands would be intuitive but aren't anymore, because most applications use very different keys or because our vocabulary changed. I.e. y(ank) and p(aste). However, once you know them they do make more sense then ctrl-v for paste (was that chosen because v is next to c on the keyboard?). What I think becomes really intuitive once you understand the basic commands however is the combination of them. If you know that 'dd' deletes a line, it is very intuitive to me that '4dd' deletes 4 lines.
- joemi 10y ago
  Others have explained it better in threads near this one than I could, but the short response to this is that intuitiveness is personal and contextual.
  - boomlinde 10y ago
    Sure, it's personal to some extent, but have you ever seen anyone sit down with a Vi/Ex/Ed-like for the first time and intuitively figured out how to work it? It's also contextual for sure, but for the word to be meaningful at all in a UI design sense, one surely must draw the line somewhere before the required context is to know the editor from experience or by having studied its documentation. Otherwise it's an absolutely useless thing to point out for the sake of discussion. Anyone can use complex things intuitively given some exercise. That doesn't make things like theoretical physics particularly intuitive in themselves.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

city41 10y ago

vim has an initial hurdle of being extremely unintuitive. But once you start learning the vim "language", you find it builds on itself and intuitiveness increases a lot. For example d is the delete command and w is the "move by word" command, so dw is "delete word". / is the search command, so /foo searches for the first instance of foo in the document. You can intuitively figure out that d/foo is "delete everything until the first found foo", and that is exactly what it does.

Arnavion 10y ago
>You can intuitively figure out that d/foo is "delete the first found foo" Makes more sense to me than "delete everything until the first found foo" at any rate. Intuitiveness is subjective.
- city41 10y ago
  You wouldn't think that if you used vim. I don't want to turn these comments into a vim tutorial so I simplified it a bit. But in the framework of vim, d/foo and what it does is totally intuitive and easy to figure out on your own. With vim when you learn a new command it applies to all the movements you know and vice versa. EDIT: rereading my comment, I should have said "/foo moves to the first instance of foo in the document" to correlate how / is a movement just like w is a movement (w is "move by one word")
  - Arnavion 10y ago
    >EDIT: rereading my comment, I should have said "/foo moves to the first instance of foo in the document" to correlate how / is a movement just like w is a movement (w is "move by one word") Yes, then it makes much more sense.

chongli 10y ago

Eh, the cockpit of a 747 isn't intuitive either. Intuitive is orthogonal to powerful.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

"Intuitive" is anything that happens to fit into the preconceptions you have. Vim is older than most software you've ever used, therefore seems unintuitive. If you were born 20 years earlier, it would be perfectly intuitive to you.

weavie 10y ago
Indeed. Vim is a lot more intuitive than Ed.