5 ms·

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 r

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 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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.
- dozzie 9y ago
  > I don't really understand the "line in my terminal for everything else" reasoning, as I don't mind alt-tabbing. What exactly don't you understand about it? For me it's the single most frequently used environment, I can do more things and do them faster than in any other way. What is there about it not to understand? Then, I don't mind alt-tabbing either. I do mind, however, the amount of it. I have multiple terminals open and I operate at the limit of my abilities to manage them. With a separate GUI window, I would either have one more window to switch through (and thus I would be over my limit) or have one terminal less to execute commands. > But I really don't understand the "constantly opening and closing my editor" thing. A workflow thing. I don't understand people running GUI for version control, or GUI for simply opening a file in a directory tree, yet people do that all the time.
- JeremyNT 9y ago
  The thing about vim is that it readily supports both modes of operation. I'll open one long running vim process per rails project I'm working on, and I use the --remote option on the command line if I want to open related files in that running vim. But it's also nice to pop open a new vim in any old directory to deal with one or two edits that don't belong to a real project. I do this all the time when dealing with docker or Dev ops type tasks that don't require managing a lot of code.

edanm 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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.
dozzie 9y ago
> I don't really understand the "line in my terminal for everything else" reasoning, as I don't mind alt-tabbing. What exactly don't you understand about it? For me it's the single most frequently used environment, I can do more things and do them faster than in any other way. What is there about it not to understand? Then, I don't mind alt-tabbing either. I do mind, however, the amount of it. I have multiple terminals open and I operate at the limit of my abilities to manage them. With a separate GUI window, I would either have one more window to switch through (and thus I would be over my limit) or have one terminal less to execute commands. > But I really don't understand the "constantly opening and closing my editor" thing. A workflow thing. I don't understand people running GUI for version control, or GUI for simply opening a file in a directory tree, yet people do that all the time.
JeremyNT 9y ago
The thing about vim is that it readily supports both modes of operation. I'll open one long running vim process per rails project I'm working on, and I use the --remote option on the command line if I want to open related files in that running vim. But it's also nice to pop open a new vim in any old directory to deal with one or two edits that don't belong to a real project. I do this all the time when dealing with docker or Dev ops type tasks that don't require managing a lot of code.