5 ms·
Why not one line? set hls ic is nu noswf On a serious note, personally disabling line numbers is the first thing I do in a new editor. Reduces visual nois
by strogonoff 6y ago
Why not one line?
set hls ic is nu noswf
On a serious note, personally disabling line numbers is the first thing I do in a new editor. Reduces visual noise—status line usually shows current line number anyway, jumping to a line might take a second and I found I don’t need to know my line numbers more frequently than once per month or so.
What I do like to enable in an editor is visible whitespace characters (helps notice levels of indent, for example). In Vim that can be accomplished with:
set list listchars+=space:•
(Might take some tweaking to make whitespace appear subtly enough, depending on your color scheme.)
- falcor84 6y agoInteresting. The first thing I always do in a new is enable the line numbers. I pair-program a lot and find them to be invaluable when talking about the code.
- strogonoff 6y agoI can see how line numbers would be immensely useful if I ever pair program remotely.
- Ancapistani 6y agoLine number are super helpful for navigating in vim, though. :54 when you’re on line 20 is much faster than any alternative.
- repsilat 6y agoSome folk like `34d` so they don't need to press shift. And sometimes set relative line numbers so they don't need to do the subtraction. Others just search for known text, which IMO is a habit I need to get into. I "got" hjkl after I disabled the cursor keys for a day, but I never followed up and disabled hjkl (or maybe even w and b!?) to get super efficient.
- strogonoff 6y agoI have never considered disabling hjkl, quite an interesting idea.
- coliveira 6y agoYou can just use 54gg, no shift involved.
- alpaca128 6y agoI often navigate with the search. It's fast as I usually know where I want to go. Also with the right setting(I think incsearch) Vim immediately jumps to the first result as you type, so I often use search to quickly peek at some code and then jump back with Esc when it doesn't warrant splitting the buffer. But I do still struggle a bit with moving within the line - w and b tend to "get caught" in long series of different symbol categories that Vim will all see as separate words/tokens. At least I got my setup with the "camelcasemotion" plugin working, which is a great help with long identifier names.
- strogonoff 6y agoI see, I suppose it depends on one’s habits then. Personally I’m used to roughly approximating relative jumps or using search to arrive at the desired identifier, but then I wouldn’t call myself especially efficient. The only time I find using :number is when I am exploring a codebase elsewhere, e.g. using GitHub’s web interface, and want to jump to a particular line in Vim to make edits—rarely happens.
- adrianmonk 6y agoI would type "8j8j8j8jjj". I type "8j" (and "8k") a lot.
- leppr 6y agoI bind those commands to "shift-j" and "shift-k" and heavily abuse them. It's not pretty, one could argue that the mouse is more efficient for such movements, but for me it's faster in practice than moving my hand to the mouse/trackpad, or than looking up a line number (either absolute or relative) and then typing it. And it has no mental burden.
- jacknews 6y agoI use H, M, L to move the cursor to the top, middle and bottom of the screen, and ctrl-f and ctr-b to scroll half a page, which drags the cursor along for the ride if it would otherwise be offscreen.
- laumars 6y agoFunny you say that about the visual noise because as someone who’s dyslexic, I find line numbers actually help with readability since it is easier for me to remember a number than it is text. I also find it especially useful in vi when working with config files. I’m sure you are aware of this feature but in case others aren’t, in vi if you type numbers before a command, it runs that commend n times. So you can quickly copy or delete multiple lines. It just goes to show how deeply personal a preference a persons code editor is.
- strogonoff 6y agoIndeed, to your last sentence. I use shift+v and a j/k relative jump to select a range of lines, then do the operation. Which is undeniably the slower way. Didn’t know how dyslexia affects this, I will keep that in mind in case I happen to work with someone with it.
- enriquto 6y agoset list listchars+=space:• This adds a lot of clutter! It's better to show only indentations (of course, using tabs): set listchars=tab:├─
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y agoLine numbers are great, until you try to cut and paste. But then again, VI/M wasn't designed for GUIs.
- strogonoff 6y agoI don’t copy and paste, I just don’t see the need for line numbers. But then I also code with syntax highlighting off about half of the time.
- mjochim 6y agoVery interesting, I don't think I've ever talked to someone who would choose to disable syntax highlighting. Do the colors actively annoy you or is it just that you don't care?
- strogonoff 6y agoI find that not having highlighting to rely on forces me to write more readable code. I might turn it on if I happen to work on a hairy codebase under time constraints. Sometimes also colors in general can get distracting and I just turn on grayscale system-wide, which also doesn’t play with syntax highlighting as text ends up being varying shades of gray with not enough contrast against the background.
- raarts 6y agoI grew up without it and I think my brain is wired to recognize visual structure instead of colors. Switching it off is the first I do.
- lloeki 6y agoI tried both ends of the spectrum. There’s definitely something real about too much colours; the archetypal example of colouring our human language tokens by type (verbs, nouns, etc) making no sense sure rings home after a while. But I found very much use of “colour”+ themeing for two things: - comments vs code, one toned down vs the other, ideally swappable with a hotkey - delimited content such as strings. It sure saves a lot of time when you get an imbalanced delimiter nested in a forest and the whole of your file changes colour starting near the imbalance. I’m very much of the opinion that a lot of syntax highlighting is just dumbed down token matching and badly designed (if at all designed), when it should be much smarter in alerting you of inconsistencies, and putting relevant content forward. + by colour I don’t necessarily mean literally in colour, bold or italics can serve well.
- jiannengli 6y agoThanks, I didn't know about putting everything on one line. I've updated the post to include this tip. As for showing line numbers, I'm often doing this to read logs on a remote VM. In those scenarios, having easy access to where you are in the file is really helpful.
- ur-whale 6y agoFor spaces, I have: set listchars=tab:>- set listchars+=trail:⋄ This shows markers for tabs and trailing whitespaces. The latter will make you very sad when you browse other people's code.