9 ms·

Well at least for me the best of Vim includes running my editor in a terminal, so I wouldn't quite say that Oni has the best of Vim.

by jswny 8y ago

INTPenis 8y ago
And being available on most distros, even if it's a basic version or just old school vi.
- wereHamster 8y ago
  Why use vi when you have ed.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    Happy medium:)
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    Why use ed when you can shoot yourself in the foot?
edanm 8y ago
You know, I've always been fascinated by this statement. Why is it more comfortable for you to be in a terminal? (For the record, I currently use Macvim but am deeply interested in Oni and other projects. I've been a vim user for many years now and consider myself reasonably proficient, although, you know, it's vim after all, there's always more to learn).
- akkartik 8y ago
  Because I already live in my terminal for everything else, and I'm constantly opening and closing my editor, and that's slower when it spawns a new window. I recently installed a plugin that lets me open MacVim with a shortcut (https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere). Everytime I use it I remember why I avoid the GUI.
  - edanm 8y ago
    I don't really understand the "line in my terminal for everything else" reasoning, as I don't mind alt-tabbing. But I really don't understand the "constantly opening and closing my editor" thing. I'm usually working on one or two projects at a time at most, and just keep a window open to that project. This is pretty much how most people work. Why doesn't that work well? I'm genuinely asking btw. I'm not sure why loving vim is so correlated with working with your editor in such an unstandard way. (I mean, I'd guess it's the opposite - people like me come to vim for reasons having nothing to do with that, and try to use it like our old IDEs, whereas people who started off wanting to do everything in the terminal look for a solution and find that vim fits them. But that's just a guess).
    - akkartik 8y ago
      Treating your shell as the environment and an editor as just one tool among many is a perfectly internally-consistent approach. Standard, even, considering how many of us do it. I don't claim it's the only workable way. Do us the same courtesy.
      - edanm 8y ago
        "I don't claim it's the only workable way. Do us the same courtesy." I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend. As I said - I'm genuinely curious as to what you feel makes this method better. I wouldn't be wasting my time asking if I didn't think there was a chance I might learn something that would make me change the way I work - that's how I picked up vim in the first place, not to mention every other improvement I've ever made in my life.
        akkartik 8y ago
        It's all good, just be careful with words like "standard" and phrases like "like most people". They can subconsciously hinder learning. This is a subject that has been hashed to death online, especially in Vim vs Emacs discussions. Emacs behaves more like an IDE, as an environment rather than a tool. Vim is further along the tool side of the spectrum (though I sense Plan 9's Acme is even further along; Vim is actually pretty moderate, believe it or not). Gvim tries to bisect the difference, but I find it to be the worst of both worlds: not as nice an experience as say Idea or PyCharm, but also encouraging "bad habits" from the terminal point of view, such as using the mouse. Or navigating where you are in the system from within the editor rather than the shell. I actually do use multiple windows and Alt-tab between them. It's just that most of them are terminal/shell/tmux windows. I do use other apps too (like a web browser). But for text processing and navigation the shell is what I like best. Anecdotally Vim users seem more sensitive to even small latencies, and GUIs invariably seem to introduce lag. Though I'm finding that I'm more tolerant of lag in my non-shell windows. Using VimAnywhere has made that clear because it causes the "universes to collide". This whole question is actually not that important, in my opinion. You were right above that it's mostly about what way you start out in. If you're reasonably effective with one set of tools, to try to switch is to bait big to catch small. There's far better uses of your time out there. Perhaps the only thing to learn is that there are many ways to skin the cat. There, now move on.
- _5meq 8y ago
  In my terminal everything is a string. All of my tools are run from the terminal ( cloud provider, provisioning software, etc. ) I can chain cli calls together to create powerful workflows. I have highly scriptable workspace management with tmux + vim. I don't have to wait for web pages to load to run commands, I can just do the thing in the same place I do everything else. Many people don't gain that much from the terminal but if you are a power user it makes your life great. I don't like GUIs, they take too much space, are always trying to sell me something, present information in an inferior way ( I like my dark, cool colored termina l color palette ), and I can't script repetitive tasks. most cli tools have the same conventions so learning new tools has way less overhead. Just a few reasons.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  For me, as a data point, there are a couple of reasons. 1) Because when I started programming, that's what I used. I'm comfortable in it because I'm comfortable in it :-) I'm pretty sure that's most of the issue to be honest. When I've asked people what they like most about their graphical IDEs, I've come away with the impression that the same thing governs the majority of their preference: it's what they are used to. 2) My vision is poor. I use a 22 point font. The layout of most GUI programs tends to leave no room for editing if I use the same kind font size (I also have poor peripheral vision, so I use a 13" display which fits comfortably in the section of space that I can see). Things like menu bars, file trees, object trees, test panels, etc, etc are more than useless to me. If I close all of them down, I'm left with exactly what I have in my terminal window. 3) I don't like to use a mouse. I use a tiling window manager. Often I work in tmux (for which I've set up key bindings exactly the same as my tiling window manager) and I might not even have X running (I probably have the most tricked out linux console of anybody I've ever heard of). I used to have a trackball, but I've given it up and now work exclusively with a laptop with a track pad because I've gotten myself to the point where I almost never have to use it. 4) Performance. I have 8 gigs of memory in this laptop. I have swap turned off. I almost never use more than 2 gigs at a time (sometimes I have a VM which has 2 gigs allocated to it, so then my memory usage creeps up to 4 gigs). Lots of memory for file buffers :-) People are always amazed at how responsive my machine is, despite being a 3 year old i5 mobile processor with 8 gigs of memory. IDE's are bloatware for me. I won't use the extra features anyway. Most of this is personal, but that's what you get for preferences. A few people I've worked with have seen my setup and have gone a similar way. I know a couple of people who also live in Emacs -- they never leave Emacs if they can help it because everything is completely integrated in a way that you just can't do in other environments (that I've seen, anyway). In the late 90's I worked on Windows stuff and my employer forced me to use Visual Studio (yeah, employers actually pulled crap like that in the 90's). I eventually modified it to the point where I liked it quite a lot. I'm sure I could do the same with most IDEs out there now, but there's no point. The terminal gives me everything I want at minimal resource overhead.
hzhou321 8y ago
The number one reason for me to use vim is also to be able to use it in a terminal. The number one reason for a terminal is to have a consistent current directory. When I double click gvim, I immediately lost. I guess you could launch editor from file, and it's OK if the file is in isolation. For me, it is never the case.

Well at least for me the best of Vim includes running my editor in a terminal, so I wouldn't quite say that Oni has the best of Vim.

by jswny 8y ago

Well at least for me the best of Vim includes running my editor in a terminal, so I wouldn't quite say that Oni has the best of Vim.

INTPenis 8y ago

And being available on most distros, even if it's a basic version or just old school vi.

wereHamster 8y ago
Why use vi when you have ed.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  Happy medium:)
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  Why use ed when you can shoot yourself in the foot?

edanm 8y ago

You know, I've always been fascinated by this statement. Why is it more comfortable for you to be in a terminal? (For the record, I currently use Macvim but am deeply interested in Oni and other projects. I've been a vim user for many years now and consider myself reasonably proficient, although, you know, it's vim after all, there's always more to learn).

akkartik 8y ago
Because I already live in my terminal for everything else, and I'm constantly opening and closing my editor, and that's slower when it spawns a new window. I recently installed a plugin that lets me open MacVim with a shortcut (https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere). Everytime I use it I remember why I avoid the GUI.
- edanm 8y ago
  I don't really understand the "line in my terminal for everything else" reasoning, as I don't mind alt-tabbing. But I really don't understand the "constantly opening and closing my editor" thing. I'm usually working on one or two projects at a time at most, and just keep a window open to that project. This is pretty much how most people work. Why doesn't that work well? I'm genuinely asking btw. I'm not sure why loving vim is so correlated with working with your editor in such an unstandard way. (I mean, I'd guess it's the opposite - people like me come to vim for reasons having nothing to do with that, and try to use it like our old IDEs, whereas people who started off wanting to do everything in the terminal look for a solution and find that vim fits them. But that's just a guess).
  - akkartik 8y ago
    Treating your shell as the environment and an editor as just one tool among many is a perfectly internally-consistent approach. Standard, even, considering how many of us do it. I don't claim it's the only workable way. Do us the same courtesy.
    - edanm 8y ago
      "I don't claim it's the only workable way. Do us the same courtesy." I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend. As I said - I'm genuinely curious as to what you feel makes this method better. I wouldn't be wasting my time asking if I didn't think there was a chance I might learn something that would make me change the way I work - that's how I picked up vim in the first place, not to mention every other improvement I've ever made in my life.
      - akkartik 8y ago
        It's all good, just be careful with words like "standard" and phrases like "like most people". They can subconsciously hinder learning. This is a subject that has been hashed to death online, especially in Vim vs Emacs discussions. Emacs behaves more like an IDE, as an environment rather than a tool. Vim is further along the tool side of the spectrum (though I sense Plan 9's Acme is even further along; Vim is actually pretty moderate, believe it or not). Gvim tries to bisect the difference, but I find it to be the worst of both worlds: not as nice an experience as say Idea or PyCharm, but also encouraging "bad habits" from the terminal point of view, such as using the mouse. Or navigating where you are in the system from within the editor rather than the shell. I actually do use multiple windows and Alt-tab between them. It's just that most of them are terminal/shell/tmux windows. I do use other apps too (like a web browser). But for text processing and navigation the shell is what I like best. Anecdotally Vim users seem more sensitive to even small latencies, and GUIs invariably seem to introduce lag. Though I'm finding that I'm more tolerant of lag in my non-shell windows. Using VimAnywhere has made that clear because it causes the "universes to collide". This whole question is actually not that important, in my opinion. You were right above that it's mostly about what way you start out in. If you're reasonably effective with one set of tools, to try to switch is to bait big to catch small. There's far better uses of your time out there. Perhaps the only thing to learn is that there are many ways to skin the cat. There, now move on.
_5meq 8y ago
In my terminal everything is a string. All of my tools are run from the terminal ( cloud provider, provisioning software, etc. ) I can chain cli calls together to create powerful workflows. I have highly scriptable workspace management with tmux + vim. I don't have to wait for web pages to load to run commands, I can just do the thing in the same place I do everything else. Many people don't gain that much from the terminal but if you are a power user it makes your life great. I don't like GUIs, they take too much space, are always trying to sell me something, present information in an inferior way ( I like my dark, cool colored termina l color palette ), and I can't script repetitive tasks. most cli tools have the same conventions so learning new tools has way less overhead. Just a few reasons.
mikekchar 8y ago
For me, as a data point, there are a couple of reasons. 1) Because when I started programming, that's what I used. I'm comfortable in it because I'm comfortable in it :-) I'm pretty sure that's most of the issue to be honest. When I've asked people what they like most about their graphical IDEs, I've come away with the impression that the same thing governs the majority of their preference: it's what they are used to. 2) My vision is poor. I use a 22 point font. The layout of most GUI programs tends to leave no room for editing if I use the same kind font size (I also have poor peripheral vision, so I use a 13" display which fits comfortably in the section of space that I can see). Things like menu bars, file trees, object trees, test panels, etc, etc are more than useless to me. If I close all of them down, I'm left with exactly what I have in my terminal window. 3) I don't like to use a mouse. I use a tiling window manager. Often I work in tmux (for which I've set up key bindings exactly the same as my tiling window manager) and I might not even have X running (I probably have the most tricked out linux console of anybody I've ever heard of). I used to have a trackball, but I've given it up and now work exclusively with a laptop with a track pad because I've gotten myself to the point where I almost never have to use it. 4) Performance. I have 8 gigs of memory in this laptop. I have swap turned off. I almost never use more than 2 gigs at a time (sometimes I have a VM which has 2 gigs allocated to it, so then my memory usage creeps up to 4 gigs). Lots of memory for file buffers :-) People are always amazed at how responsive my machine is, despite being a 3 year old i5 mobile processor with 8 gigs of memory. IDE's are bloatware for me. I won't use the extra features anyway. Most of this is personal, but that's what you get for preferences. A few people I've worked with have seen my setup and have gone a similar way. I know a couple of people who also live in Emacs -- they never leave Emacs if they can help it because everything is completely integrated in a way that you just can't do in other environments (that I've seen, anyway). In the late 90's I worked on Windows stuff and my employer forced me to use Visual Studio (yeah, employers actually pulled crap like that in the 90's). I eventually modified it to the point where I liked it quite a lot. I'm sure I could do the same with most IDEs out there now, but there's no point. The terminal gives me everything I want at minimal resource overhead.

hzhou321 8y ago

The number one reason for me to use vim is also to be able to use it in a terminal. The number one reason for a terminal is to have a consistent current directory. When I double click gvim, I immediately lost. I guess you could launch editor from file, and it's OK if the file is in isolation. For me, it is never the case.