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But most modern editors have similarly efficient shortcuts for all those things that fit alongside modern UI shortcuts. e.g. in Sublime: <Ctrl-D><Bksp> to dele

But most modern editors have similarly efficient shortcuts for all those things that fit alongside modern UI shortcuts. e.g. in Sublime: <Ctrl-D><Bksp> to delete a word. <Ctrl-Shift-D> to duplicate a line. [0] <Ctrl-F> for search. <Ctrl-Home/End> to go to the top or bottom. I'm increasingly unconvinced that vim has much to offer in terms of shortcuts when compared to actual modern editors, rather than some kind of strawman notepad. [0] No numeric repetition, but I was never convinced by that feature TBH. In most cases, the mental overhead of working out the appropriate number for a situation was greater for me than just spamming a button a few times.

jjcm 10y ago
The biggest thing with vim is it provides a language for actions rather than individual actions itself. This allows for far greater action control than a standard editor via shortcuts. For example, maybe you need to delete the next two words (d2w - delete 2 words). Or maybe you want to delete the next four words, then replace them with something else (c4w - change 4 words). Or maybe you need to change the every letter of the next ten lines to uppercase, until you hit the letter 'a' on each line (qq0gUtaj10@q). VIMs shortcuts aren't better because they're more powerful, they're better because there's an infinite combination of them.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  As I mentioned above, I'm not really convinced that numeric repetitions are that useful, because counting instances, even at a glance, is more mental overhead than just pressing a button a few times. Because most of the time I don't want to "delete n words", I want to delete these words, and there happen to be n of them. More generally, my experience of vim is that I'd spend longer working out how to do something with one command than I'd have taken to just use a few simpler actions. And that didn't really get better with time (I used it as my primary editor for a few years), because sufficiently complicated editing tasks just don't arise that often. And personally, I find Sublime's multiple selections much easier to apply in ad-hoc ways to unusual editing scenarios than vim's vocabulary. A common scenario I encounter, is that I realise I need to make a change in many matching places, but I don't know immediately whether it applies to the entire file, or whether there are some edge cases. In Sublime, I select one instance, step through adding matching ones to the selection and excluding any I don't want, and then make the edit confident that I'm changing exactly the things I want to. In vim, my experience was that I'd write a substitution, discover it was too general when it broke something, and then try to work out how to exclude the cases I didn't want, which was often nontrivial. EDIT: Thinking about it now, I guess the vim way to do the above would be to / for the first case, make the change in insert mode and then use /. for the others. Although if it's a complicated edit, it might not be effective to use insert mode, so I'd need a macro maybe? I found those kinda fiddly tbh.
  - baldfat 10y ago
    I have been using VIM since I had a floppy disc of it on my Amega I got from my dad. I will say I don't use VIM all the time and right now I am loving VS Code but in the end I always am using VIM modes in whatever editor I am in. RStudio or VS Code.
  - sullyj3 10y ago
    It's not just repetition of say, do this command more times to words. There are more nouns available to apply your verbs to. You can "change a paragraph": `cap`, change the contents of some brackets: `ci(`. I find myself using various permutations of these all the time, and missing them enormously when I'm not in vim. My favourite is `caa` to change an argument in a function call, respecting commas and parens, although that one came in a plugin I think. I completely agree that often figuring out how many words I want to apply a command to is too much effort; however of course vim has visual selection like any other editor, so I can just press v to begin selecting, then w a few times to move to the beginning of the next word, and then I can apply any of the verbs in my arsenal to the resulting selection. I find that having the option of <count> repetition is much more useful with large text objects that I can easily subitize. It's very natural for me to delete 3 paragraphs with `d3}` for instance, moreso than selecting them then deleting them. I think that my very favorite motion in vim might be the `f` key. You use it like `fj` to move to the next occurrence of 'j' on the current line. I also agree with you that multiple cursors are a much better solution than regexes to the same edit in a few different nearby places. There are multiple selection plugins for vim, but they don't work very well, and I wish it had better support. On the other hand, regexes scale much much better.
    - aninhumer 10y ago
      >cap, caa, ci( Except those don't make much sense as compositions, because they overload the letters. cap? What does change-append-paste mean? Oh it actually means change-a-paragraph? Okay... Sure, there are some convenient patterns to vim's shortcuts, but I think the extent to which they're a "language" is overstated. And that's fine, since it's mostly about muscle memory anyway. >I think that my very favorite motion in vim might be the `f` key. Yeah I did miss that one for a while. >On the other hand, regexes scale much much better. If I want regexes, I can use find and replace with them. And I think the minimal (keyboard driven) GUI is a lot easier to use for that than s/// syntax.

jjcm 10y ago

The biggest thing with vim is it provides a language for actions rather than individual actions itself. This allows for far greater action control than a standard editor via shortcuts. For example, maybe you need to delete the next two words (d2w - delete 2 words). Or maybe you want to delete the next four words, then replace them with something else (c4w - change 4 words). Or maybe you need to change the every letter of the next ten lines to uppercase, until you hit the letter 'a' on each line (qq0gUtaj10@q). VIMs shortcuts aren't better because they're more powerful, they're better because there's an infinite combination of them.

aninhumer 10y ago
As I mentioned above, I'm not really convinced that numeric repetitions are that useful, because counting instances, even at a glance, is more mental overhead than just pressing a button a few times. Because most of the time I don't want to "delete n words", I want to delete these words, and there happen to be n of them. More generally, my experience of vim is that I'd spend longer working out how to do something with one command than I'd have taken to just use a few simpler actions. And that didn't really get better with time (I used it as my primary editor for a few years), because sufficiently complicated editing tasks just don't arise that often. And personally, I find Sublime's multiple selections much easier to apply in ad-hoc ways to unusual editing scenarios than vim's vocabulary. A common scenario I encounter, is that I realise I need to make a change in many matching places, but I don't know immediately whether it applies to the entire file, or whether there are some edge cases. In Sublime, I select one instance, step through adding matching ones to the selection and excluding any I don't want, and then make the edit confident that I'm changing exactly the things I want to. In vim, my experience was that I'd write a substitution, discover it was too general when it broke something, and then try to work out how to exclude the cases I didn't want, which was often nontrivial. EDIT: Thinking about it now, I guess the vim way to do the above would be to / for the first case, make the change in insert mode and then use /. for the others. Although if it's a complicated edit, it might not be effective to use insert mode, so I'd need a macro maybe? I found those kinda fiddly tbh.
- baldfat 10y ago
  I have been using VIM since I had a floppy disc of it on my Amega I got from my dad. I will say I don't use VIM all the time and right now I am loving VS Code but in the end I always am using VIM modes in whatever editor I am in. RStudio or VS Code.
- sullyj3 10y ago
  It's not just repetition of say, do this command more times to words. There are more nouns available to apply your verbs to. You can "change a paragraph": `cap`, change the contents of some brackets: `ci(`. I find myself using various permutations of these all the time, and missing them enormously when I'm not in vim. My favourite is `caa` to change an argument in a function call, respecting commas and parens, although that one came in a plugin I think. I completely agree that often figuring out how many words I want to apply a command to is too much effort; however of course vim has visual selection like any other editor, so I can just press v to begin selecting, then w a few times to move to the beginning of the next word, and then I can apply any of the verbs in my arsenal to the resulting selection. I find that having the option of <count> repetition is much more useful with large text objects that I can easily subitize. It's very natural for me to delete 3 paragraphs with `d3}` for instance, moreso than selecting them then deleting them. I think that my very favorite motion in vim might be the `f` key. You use it like `fj` to move to the next occurrence of 'j' on the current line. I also agree with you that multiple cursors are a much better solution than regexes to the same edit in a few different nearby places. There are multiple selection plugins for vim, but they don't work very well, and I wish it had better support. On the other hand, regexes scale much much better.
  - aninhumer 10y ago
    >cap, caa, ci( Except those don't make much sense as compositions, because they overload the letters. cap? What does change-append-paste mean? Oh it actually means change-a-paragraph? Okay... Sure, there are some convenient patterns to vim's shortcuts, but I think the extent to which they're a "language" is overstated. And that's fine, since it's mostly about muscle memory anyway. >I think that my very favorite motion in vim might be the `f` key. Yeah I did miss that one for a while. >On the other hand, regexes scale much much better. If I want regexes, I can use find and replace with them. And I think the minimal (keyboard driven) GUI is a lot easier to use for that than s/// syntax.