7 ms·

You don't know what you're missing. Want to be a real beast? Learn vim and emacs, both. You want an editor where "literally all the hotkeys" is literally mean

by hashkb 9y ago

You don't know what you're missing. Want to be a real beast? Learn vim and emacs, both. You want an editor where "literally all the hotkeys" is literally meaningless.

ShabbosGoy 9y ago
Or you could just use Spacemacs.
- erikbye 9y ago
  Not sure why this got downvoted. While I prefer my own customized Emacs or Vim, Spacemacs is pretty decent from the jump. You just need to activate the layer for your language.
- bfrog 9y ago
  This is what I've been doing and I have to say its pretty great. There's always a few things that drive you crazy of course, but helm+projectile, flymake, and such are just so damn useful over using vim's poor attempts at the same.
coldtea 9y ago
>You don't know what you're missing. Or it's diminishing returns, and most of it is busywork (fiddling with settings) and the pride of customization -- as opposed to any real tremendous productivity gains. And I say that as someone who've used Vi(m) for 15+ years in platforms ranging from SunOS (pre Solaris), to Linux, Windows and OS X. I've also fiddled with Emacs for a year or so before (in uni) but it never really stuck. I use ST3 and Vim (terminal sessions) now and don't find Vim offering any huge productivity boost. For all the folklore it's just an editor with some nice ideas, and a lot of random stuff throw in stolen from this or that earlier environment (read how Joy came up with vi).
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  > don't find Vim offering any huge productivity boost Really? I feel so much faster with Vim bindings. Watching other people try to edit text even with OS or other-editor bindings, let alone just selecting text with a mouse, is very frustrating. I know other editors have bookmarks, and I imagine they might work as well as in Vim. But, besides Emacs, in what other editors can you 'delete everything up to the next `=`' or 'delete everything from the current cursor position to the start of the third word (to the right)'. Gah – even cutting and pasting more than a line or two is so much easier in Vim than anything else. And that's just editing text. Editing code is even harder for me! Trying to remove a 'word' in a long camelCase variable without being able to jump to a letter or a search pattern consists of hitting way too many arrow keys.
  - jnordwick 9y ago
    > in what other editors can you 'delete everything up to the next `=` And how does being able to edit text a few seconds faster contribute to development speed and quality. Not a single bit. While it may let you feel cool, it really doesn't add anything to the bottom line.
    - ludston 9y ago
      Vim gives the ability to refactor large amounts of code rapidly. This doesn't make it so your typing speed is significantly faster, but it removes obstacles to refactoring large amounts of code which means that as a developer you will have more choices available to tackling some problems. This can only really be shown via examples. Let's say, a lazy person has created a 3000 line file containing the declarations of a datastructure, and you would like to modify the constructors to each have an additional shared parameter. In order to add this parameter you could add some behaviour to the constructor definition. With vim you have a new choice open to you: you can define a macro that to find and modify all of the constructors in your declaration file in 20 seconds. Now you can choose how you would like the constructors to look, rather than the choice being made for you by the existing code. There are of course other ways to bulk-update text files, but the advantage of learning vim is that it is context-free. The same commands used to modify C# are fine to use for modifying javascript or XML. (i.e. you don't have to use parsing libraries)
komali2 9y ago
Dunno man, seems like I'd be missing ctrl+shift+f search across all files, with a nice little box that easily lets me filter out the .less files when I'm doing JS stuff, and vice-versa. Obviously this is available in emacs, but not vim without serious configuring, and not with everything staying within a nice single editor context.

by hashkb 9y ago

You don't know what you're missing. Want to be a real beast? Learn vim and emacs, both. You want an editor where "literally all the hotkeys" is literally meaningless.

ShabbosGoy 9y ago

Or you could just use Spacemacs.

erikbye 9y ago
Not sure why this got downvoted. While I prefer my own customized Emacs or Vim, Spacemacs is pretty decent from the jump. You just need to activate the layer for your language.
bfrog 9y ago
This is what I've been doing and I have to say its pretty great. There's always a few things that drive you crazy of course, but helm+projectile, flymake, and such are just so damn useful over using vim's poor attempts at the same.

coldtea 9y ago

>You don't know what you're missing. Or it's diminishing returns, and most of it is busywork (fiddling with settings) and the pride of customization -- as opposed to any real tremendous productivity gains. And I say that as someone who've used Vi(m) for 15+ years in platforms ranging from SunOS (pre Solaris), to Linux, Windows and OS X. I've also fiddled with Emacs for a year or so before (in uni) but it never really stuck. I use ST3 and Vim (terminal sessions) now and don't find Vim offering any huge productivity boost. For all the folklore it's just an editor with some nice ideas, and a lot of random stuff throw in stolen from this or that earlier environment (read how Joy came up with vi).

aeorgnoieang 9y ago
> don't find Vim offering any huge productivity boost Really? I feel so much faster with Vim bindings. Watching other people try to edit text even with OS or other-editor bindings, let alone just selecting text with a mouse, is very frustrating. I know other editors have bookmarks, and I imagine they might work as well as in Vim. But, besides Emacs, in what other editors can you 'delete everything up to the next `=`' or 'delete everything from the current cursor position to the start of the third word (to the right)'. Gah – even cutting and pasting more than a line or two is so much easier in Vim than anything else. And that's just editing text. Editing code is even harder for me! Trying to remove a 'word' in a long camelCase variable without being able to jump to a letter or a search pattern consists of hitting way too many arrow keys.
- jnordwick 9y ago
  > in what other editors can you 'delete everything up to the next `=` And how does being able to edit text a few seconds faster contribute to development speed and quality. Not a single bit. While it may let you feel cool, it really doesn't add anything to the bottom line.
  - ludston 9y ago
    Vim gives the ability to refactor large amounts of code rapidly. This doesn't make it so your typing speed is significantly faster, but it removes obstacles to refactoring large amounts of code which means that as a developer you will have more choices available to tackling some problems. This can only really be shown via examples. Let's say, a lazy person has created a 3000 line file containing the declarations of a datastructure, and you would like to modify the constructors to each have an additional shared parameter. In order to add this parameter you could add some behaviour to the constructor definition. With vim you have a new choice open to you: you can define a macro that to find and modify all of the constructors in your declaration file in 20 seconds. Now you can choose how you would like the constructors to look, rather than the choice being made for you by the existing code. There are of course other ways to bulk-update text files, but the advantage of learning vim is that it is context-free. The same commands used to modify C# are fine to use for modifying javascript or XML. (i.e. you don't have to use parsing libraries)

komali2 9y ago

Dunno man, seems like I'd be missing ctrl+shift+f search across all files, with a nice little box that easily lets me filter out the .less files when I'm doing JS stuff, and vice-versa. Obviously this is available in emacs, but not vim without serious configuring, and not with everything staying within a nice single editor context.