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Am I foolish for not believing the vi/vim hype? I understand that it's been around for as long as rocks, and that it's quite handy since it's available everywh
by georgieporgie 16y ago
Am I foolish for not believing the vi/vim hype? I understand that it's been around for as long as rocks, and that it's quite handy since it's available everywhere. I use it daily, in fact, but rarely for more than basic editing.
I'll just come out and say it: my favorite editor is Visual Studio. Sure, it's slow to load and rather fat now, but I'm talking solely about the editing functionality.
With vim, I have to climb an amazing learning curve, regularly practicing all sorts of commands to achieve basic productivity. With VS, any command I don't recall is readily available through the menus. As I access it in the menus, I'm reminded of the keyboard shortcut, so it seems like a much more natural leaning experience to me.
- oldpatricka 16y agoI think so long as you're satisfied with your tool, you should just keep using it. If you "don't believe the hype", then doesn't just that mean that the benefits that people describe from their experience with vim/emacs/whatever aren't that important to you? If when people describe how they like being able to delete 10 lines with 10dd, or use '.' to repeat the last thing they did, and that doesn't sound interesting to you, then don't worry about it. Personally, I love vim, and have been using it for years and years, and feel hobbled without it, but if you're satisfied with your tool, and don't long for something better, stick with it.
- mcknz 16y agoFor me, vi/m is like kale -- I know it's very healthy, and I've tried it several times, but it'll be a cold day in hell before I ever eat the damn thing again.
- cryptoz 16y agoWell, you better eat some kale then. It's just barely above freezing in Hell right now, actually. Might drop below 0 sometime over the weekend I think. http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Nord-Tr%C3%B8ndelag/Stj%C3%B8rdal/Hell/ http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Nord-Tr%C3%B8ndelag/Stj%C3%B8r...
- NickPollard 16y agoYour comments about Vim's learning curve are spot on, and I don't think any vimmer will disagree with you, but the argument they make (which I agree with) is that the cost/benefit ratio is worth it. If you only code every now and then, so you've got a lot of time between sessions to forget things, and not a whole lot of time in total, then something like Visual Studio which has good 'discoverability' is going to be better for you - as you say, if you get lost just go to the menu and it does a pretty good job of showing you around. If, however, you are coding full time for a living, spending at least 8 hours a day 5 days a week coding (and let's face it, for most people on HN it's probably more like 12 hours a day 6 days a week), then spending even 2 whole weeks getting to grips with an esoteric but POWERFUL editor like Vim will very quickly pay off in terms of time saved and productivity gained.
- tieTYT 16y agoIs there anyone out there that has given eclipse/intellij idea a fair chance and decided Vim was better for coding java? It's difficult for me to imagine coding without the built in refactorings it provides and shortcuts like ctrl+n and ctrl+alt+h.
- steveklabnik 16y agoI've heard from lots of vim people that do actually use Eclipse to make up for Java's inadequacies, yes.
- w1ntermute 16y agoThere are Vim emulation plugins for Eclipse, if you want the best of both worlds.
- SkyMarshal 16y agoAnd don't forget eclim, a Vim front-end for Eclipse (or an Eclipse back-end for Vim): http://eclim.org/ http://eclim.org/
- ovi256 16y ago>any command I don't recall is readily available through the menus. Any full featured editor has so many commands, menus are not practical to display them. VS included. So you're either using just using a subset of VS' functionality, or use hotkeys in VS too.
- georgieporgie 16y agoThat's true, I misspoke. A wide variety of commands are available through the menus, and the rest are pretty readily discoverable through the Tools | Options | Keyboard. I'm definitely using hotkeys very heavily in Visual Studio.
- secret 16y agoI kind of agree. I prefer the middle ground of notepad++ (with plugins for code completion and ftp/file explorer). Light and powerful while still resembling something designed for human consumption.
- ldh 16y agoI'll just come out and say it: my favorite editor is Visual Studio Not to be overly pedantic, but your favorite IDE is Visual Studio, and you just happen to use whatever crappy editor component comes bundled with it. If we could have full-blown Vim embedded inside IDEs instead of good-but-incomplete plugins which merely give you some of the key mappings, I'd be elated and couldn't see why anyone would stick with the Notepad-style editor which is the default.
- kd5bjo 16y agoI never tried to make it work, but the vim distribution for Windows used to include a COM object which could be used as your Visual Studio editor.
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- wahnfrieden 16y agoI haven't used it myself, but ViEmu for VS looks unexpectedly comprehensive and worth checking out if you need to use VS.
- mmavnn 16y agovsvim also provides a lot of Vim goodness in VS. The main lacking feature (for me, personally) is macro support.
- Derbasti 16y ago
- sixtofour 16y agoVisual Studio? Sure, as long as you're only going to be coding on Windows. I'm curious, does anyone use Visual Studio for non-code editing? For example, I'm typing this in Vim right now. I use Vim for lots of meant-for-human-readers text.
- georgieporgie 16y ago> as long as you're only going to be coding on Windows. In the past, I've used VS for editing PHP, which I then deployed to the server using a keyboard shortcut. I understand what you're saying, but I want to point out that VS can be used as an editor even when the target platform isn't MS.
- semanticist 16y agoBut can you use it as an editor when the target platform is humans, that is, when you're not writing code at all?
- georgieporgie 16y agoSure, why not? I wouldn't start up a VS instance just to edit text, but if I have one running, it's my editor of choice.
- sixtofour 16y agoYes I'm sure it can. What I'm curious about, is it so good an editor that people commonly use it for general text editing for non-code text? I know Vim and Emacs gets used like that a lot, maybe Notepad too.
- georgieporgie 16y agoAs I said to another commenter, yes, as long as I have a VS instance running, it's my text editor of choice. The startup time is too long for off-hand editing (I suppose this is hardware dependent). In that case, I'll open Notepad for quick to-do lists, or vi for non-line-ending-mangling tasks. It's pretty unusual for me not to have VS running, though.
- thasmin 16y agoVisual Studio is a great IDE for writing .NET code and is very good at C and C++ on Windows. When I started with PHP on Linux after 7 years of C++ and C# in VS, I quickly realized there was nothing comparable to VS and decided to scale the Vim learning cliff. I've found Vim's text editing to be better than VS. For example, it's extremely to change a string - ci" - where in VS it's ctrl-leftarrow a few times then ctrl-shift-rightarrow a few times. In Vim it's much harder to compile things, no Intellisense, no refactoring, no decent equivalent to the Solution Explorer, and tons of other missing things. There's no doubt about it. A lot of these things are less useful when working in PHP, so Vim makes sense there. Not believing the Vim hype is like wondering how anybody could be a Dallas Cowboys fan, which makes a lot of sense to people who grew up or live in Dallas. To people writing code where VS isn't available, there's more focus on editing letters which Vim lets you do more efficiently.
- flashgordon 16y agoActually I had the same argument about 15 years ago when I started using vim. Actually vim was forced on me on my first week of uni. We had to use "unix" (woooah)... anyhoo, the first 2 weeks were a total pain as we didnt have (or I couldnt find) alternatives... yes there was emacs but I couldnt be bothered go to another non-UI editor... but after that there was no looking back.. I think it is after that initial two week period that most vimmers remember and appreciate. I know it is hard to justify plonking down 2 weeks when your current methods work. For me it is the ability to type what I am thinking without having to reach for the mouse (I know in VS you could customize keyboard shortcuts exactly the way you want but somehow it seemed a lot more obvious in vim for me).
- unwind 16y agoBy "non-UI", I take it you mean "non-GUI"? emacs certainly has its fair share of user interface, it'd be kind of hard to use otherwise. It can, admittedly, be kind of hard to use anyway, but that's not because it lacks a UI.
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- dhimes 16y agogvim has menus and the keyboard-reinforcing shortcut hints. Also, you can copy/paste with other windows (which is why I started using it over vim).
- tygorius 16y agoI'll echo the gvim menu hints recommendation for Windows users. As to copy/paste, does that depend on the platform? I use vim in a terminal on Linux and Ctl+Shft+C/Ctl+Shft+V on selected text works fine for clipboard transfers. I don't use vim on Windows often enough to remember how things work there, however, and the article that prompted this discussion was focused on Mac usage.
- dhimes 16y agoI don't recall. I use gvim/vim on linux (although not gvim from term, because I don't like seeing the GLib errors :) ).
- tygorius 16y agoAm I foolish for not believing the vi/vim hype? Not at all. If VS suits your needs, then rock on! Personally, I enjoy the occasional vi/vim story here, as in reading the comments I almost always come away with several new ways of doing things in vim. I think there's a better question to be asked, however. Given that programming involves a seemingly endless stream of tools/techniques that seem good enough and alternatives that are promised to be much better, do you have an efficient strategy for determining which alternatives to explore? (This is a question I've been wrestling with myself recently.) How much time should be budgeting for exploring an alternative before writing it off as a time sink instead of productivity multiplier? In your case, since you already use vi/vim daily for some editing tasks, I'd suggest a low time-investment strategy of lowering the slope of your learning curve: review how you normally use it, isolate one or two procedures that seem awkward or irritating, and then focus a small amount of time on researching/practicing the recommended alternative practices of experienced users. I've found that by focusing on the occasional experiment, learning is much more enjoyable. If I think about how much I don't know about vim, on the other hand, I'm inclined to feel overwhelmed and put off learning anything. Admittedly, this approach isn't going to help if your resistance point is learning to dump the arrow keys and mouse. On that one, I don't know that there really is any good alternative to a couple of weeks of devoted effort.
- georgieporgie 16y agoVim certainly seems to have phenomenal potential. One problem I have, however, is the discovery of options, plugins, and "best practices" which lead to high productivity in vim. Basically, I want to pair program with some vim experts and talk about how they use vim. Incidentally, in relation to your last paragraph, I don't see any advantage to vim's keyboard usage because I use a Kinesis Classic with a Dvorak layout. My arrow keys, home, end, page up, and page down are all within reach from home row. And of course, the Dvorak layout makes some vim shortcuts less intuitive. As for the mouse, I hardly touch it while coding.
- roel_v 16y agoOh, but you need to use viemu (viemu.com), to have the sweet editing goodness of vim with the other great features of the VS IDE. It's awesome.