7 ms·

Flame suit on, but I really don't understand the appeal. I have reams of arcane bits of information to commit to memory already. .Net in two languages plus VB6

Flame suit on, but I really don't understand the appeal. I have reams of arcane bits of information to commit to memory already. .Net in two languages plus VB6 for legacy code. SQL in more dialects than I care to list, each with their own quirks and limitations. HTML and JavaScript. XML and various associated technologies like XPath. That's just professionally; once I go home I can add in photography and music straight off with others at different levels. There's only so many things one can usefully commit to memory (edit - yes, I meant am prepared to dedicate the time to committing to memory); odd bits are just easier to look up. So why, exactly, should I voluntarily use a text editor whose interface was already far behind the state of the art when I started school? :q!. I've had others try to persuade me of the joys and power of vi; I'm not even slightly convinced and that is the one command I'm committing to memory.

jvanenk 15y ago
VIM is muscle memory to me. I don't usually think about what I'm typing. I just think: 'I want this text over here' or 'I need all these phrases replaced with this new one' and then my fingers do it...like scratching an itch. That being said, one still needs to learn it to begin with. I'm lucky that I decided to sit down during college and at least learn the basics. I'm not convinced that it makes sense for every one to learn VIM or Emacs if they are perfectly proficient as they are now. For me, it's the right answer as long as I'm not pairing with some one who doesn't know VIM.
- Yhippa 15y ago
  I've found that using vi is like driving a manual transmission car after driving an automatic for a long time. There's a brief adjustment period but then it all comes back to me in terms of knowing how to use it. I tend to be lazy and use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible regardless of the OS I'm using. With vi it's basically heaven since they were able to make it a powerful text editor without a modern GUI.
rhizome31 15y ago
> There's only so many things one can usefully commit to memory Can you refer to any scientific research to back up that statement? My impression is that the more you use your memory, the easier it is to remember new stuff. Memory seems to be more like a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it gets, rather than a bucket that can get filled up.
- robryan 15y ago
  I think it's sensible if thought of as more time investment rather than how much you can commit to memory. Learning something like vim is going to take some time and is perfectly reasonable to question if there is a whole other stack of things you are also attempting to become proficient in.
  - revscat 15y ago
    It is reasonable, but... I have been using vi/vim for almost 15 years now. Various technologies have come and gone (or persisted), but the underlying tool I use to make them sing has not. Early in my career I made the decision to learn vim, and it is not a decision I have ever regretted. Yes, it meant that in the beginning there were things that took me longer to do. But now? Now I can do so much more so much quicker. And after a while -- and it is not all that long of a while -- it becomes second nature. The fundamentals become a part of your fingers, just like touch typing. You no longer have to hunt and peck to type out the word "lightning". You just do it. vim's keybindings become similarly engrained. It just takes practice.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  I voted you up since I agree with your muscle premise in real world situations with realistic amounts of information, but here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound ;)
irahul 15y ago
> a text editor whose interface was already far behind the state of the art when I started school? And what exactly is this state of the art you talk about? If it's the IDEs you are talking about, saying that they suck at text editing will be an understatement. Code completion, refactoring support etc isn't text editing. When I am using a language which requires a lot of boilerplate and demands an IDE, I go for some plugin which gives me vim keybindings(eclim for java, don't do much C#). Code is text at the end of the day, and something which isn't good at munging text isn't going to be my code editor. Eclipse, Visual Studio are both good tools, but they aren't good at munging text, not at all. And the boilerplate code they generate doesn't do anything to mitigate this. > So why, exactly, should I voluntarily use a text editor Because it isn't a pain in the ass like the IDEs when it comes to text editing.
- davidw 15y ago
  > And what exactly is this state of the art you talk about? Oh, that's easy: Emacs :-)
- CJefferson 15y ago
  Yes, but vim doesn't do code completion or have refactoring support, which is something I like in my IDE. Before someone tells me it does, I've had competent vim users try to get C++ support set up for me before, and it is almost worse than useless in code completion, code refactoring, and even trivial things like "jump to compiler error/warning".
  - veyron 15y ago
    vim does do code completion ... For example, in my gvim, control-p shows the autocomplete list.
    - CJefferson 15y ago
      Does it work with the boost headers? Or member functions? Eclipse and VS can handle these both with ease. If you think it does, I'd be interested to know your setup, as I've never been able to get such a thing to work effectively in vim.
evilduck 15y ago
I'd say it's an old interface, but that it's still state of the art (there's a reason there's a vi/vim mode or plugin for every major editor except emacs and that you've seen a resurgence of modal editors as the programming world has moved away from boilerplate laden languages). Don't think of it as knowledge competing for headspace for languages and quirks but as knowledge that augments those arcane bits. For your :q! example, it looks daunting but you really don't end up memorizing it verbatim like that, much like you don't memorize adding semicolons verbatim to the end of your C# lines of code or adding closing tags to markup languages, it's just part of the language, a line end implicitly requires a semicolon so you just do it, vim commands are prefixed with colons so you just do that too. The q is quit, which is hardly any worse than remembering Cmd-q or Ctrl-q is quitting for OS level shortcuts and the exclamation mark means "force", so it's usually unnecessary unless you're trying to quit without saving your changes, or doing something the command otherwise wouldn't normally allow. The exclamation mark is used in tandem with other commands too, so you don't mentally remember ":q! is how I quit a file without saving changes", you memorize how to build up the command you want, "I want to issue a command, type a colon" then "I want to quit the editor, type a q", then "I want to quit without saving, so force it, type an exclamation mark". And if it really bothers you, you can configure vim to prompt you for an action if it would normally require a ! and you left it off.
- irahul 15y ago
  > (there's a reason there's a vi/vim mode or plugin for every major editor except emacs Viper? Vim mode? That's another story that these vim modes in emacs are hated by both emacs and vim users. I don't know who exactly they cater to.
  - evilduck 15y ago
    I agree that they're usually sub-par, but it's telling that someone on every major IDE tries to address the lack of modal editing. Personally, when I'm using .Net or Java, I tend to keep the IDE open and open up gVim along side it, since it's rare for me to need the text-munging capabilities of vim simultaneously with the boilerplate/intellisense features of the IDEs.
  - 15y ago
sixtofour 15y ago
"There's only so many things one can usefully commit to memory" That's similar to not learning English because the dictionary is too large to memorize. As jvanenk says elsewhere in here, it's muscle memory, not memorization. You don't "remember" how to walk or use a pencil, you just think about the goal (move body over there, write sonnet) and muscle memory takes care of the details. Most vimmers have had the experience of someone watching over their shoulder and they say "wait, how did you do that." And then you have to pause and think it through, because you yourself don't know anymore, it's just in you. It would be ludicrous to try to learn all of vim, and it's absolutely unnecessary for using vim (or any other fine grained editor) effectively. You learn what's useful to you at the moment. If you do anything a lot that irritates you, there's almost certainly something in vim (or any other power editor) that will reduce it down to a keystroke or three. I'm not saying you should learn and use vim, only that your objection (too much to learn) is misplaced.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  > Most vimmers have had the experience of someone watching over their shoulder and they say "wait, how did you do that." And then you have to pause and think it through, because you yourself don't know anymore, it's just in you. I had the interesting experience of learning vim over the course of many shared ssh+screen sessions with an experienced vim user, trying to get work done. "How'd you just do that" represents my primary method of learning for a while, and I definitely got a response of "hang on, let me try it again so I can tell you" more than once.
- mun2mun 15y ago
  Most vimmers have had the experience of someone watching over their shoulder and they say "wait, how did you do that." I agree wholeheartedly. Watching my colleague to code in vim is a turning event of my programming career.
chernevik 15y ago
I am but an egg, but . . . - Knowledge of vi keystrokes allows integration of automated text editing with other shell commands, as those keystrokes are scriptable. - Search and replace commands allows fine-grained specification of global texts. Tricks like "delete all lines from the start of this code block to the end" are no big deal. - vi easily incorporates the output of shell commands into the text you're editing.
ZeroGravitas 15y ago
Something that continually surprises me is how a lot of these things are interrelated historically, but people teaching these things either don't know that or don't think it's important to pass on. By which I mostly mean stuff coming through the unix tradition like grep, regex, vi-keys etc. You meet these things for the first time and think, why would I bother learning all that arcane knowledge just to do this one thing, but then later you realise that you can leverage that knowledge across a wide range of tools. Obviously you mention C# and .Net so you swim in a different pond and are less likely to see the same level of reuse, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
Goladus 15y ago
The cool thing about a good text editor is that you can use it for ALL of those things. I'm an emacs guy not a vim guy but this fundamental point is similar. Being good at vi means you're good at editing arbitrary text whether it's VB6, SQL, HTML, JavaScript, XML, wiki markup, the output of 'find' or 'ls -l', or some randomly formatted table that someone sent you in an email.
jamesrcole 15y ago
This is a matter of cost vs benefit, not memory.
X-Istence 15y ago
I have been using vim for a little while now (1+ years, so I still consider myself a newbie) and I have found that it has become second nature, I don't think about it anymore I just do. I learned how to drive a manual car a couple years ago and these days I just don't think about it anymore. I shift completely absentmindedly, it just happens. The response is built into my body, I no longer have to provide it any thought power. I've become much more productive with vim than I have with any other text editor.
erikb 15y ago
I really appreciate your comment. Anyway, this comment was not meant to convince non-vi-ers to start using vi. You don't start using vi because it has a great ":" command that you can use from line X to line Y to apply some other command to them and nobody actually expects you to (or should, at least). It was for people struggling while getting started in vi. People like me, on their way to true programming-buddhahood. Not everybody has that goal and not everybody should have. Kudos for following your path. (But also, I think that you don't need to read vi stuff because it will not give you anything, anyway)
dasil003 15y ago
Here's why I switched to vim full-time: Ubiquity across time and platforms. If you invest the knowledge to learn Vim now, it will still be useful as long as keyboards exist and are used to write programs. You can also use it whether you are on Mac, Windows, Linux or whatever future OS comes out. You can use it over a high latency flaky SSH connection surprisingly effectively. The notion of state-of-the-art is a red herring. Vim is a reasonably optimal mapping of all the keys on the keyboard to general purpose editing tasks with reasonably optimal internal grammar for combining commands in a logical way. In terms of general purpose editing, I don't think it's possible to make something "more advanced" than Vim, just different. Of course in the GUI and IDE department there are many advancements, but how much are these worth? The answer is that if you pour millions of dollars into IDEs for constrained languages like Java you are going to get some specialized tools that outperform general tools like Vim or Emacs without similar language-specific optimization. That's great as long as you stay within the approved ecosystem, but not so good if you want to venture off into a new language or DSL that doesn't have IDE support. Personally that feels stunting to me; I want to try out new technologies at will without feeling unproductive until some monolithic software package decides to catch up. Over the years through all the GUI advancements, the UNIX philosophy has proven that it still provides some of, if not the most fertile ground for creative hacking. I'd rather have 200 CLI utilities than 10,000 special purpose apps with thousands of non-orthogonal knobs and dials. Vim is a similar foundation for text editing. I can get some amazingly powerful plugins for specific uses (Fugitive makes "state of the art" git GUIs like Tower look like Playskool toys), but its bare functionality for manipulating text files is enough to get my comfortable and productive in any new language quickly, and I know I'll never have to learn a new editor for the rest of my life.
- Jach 15y ago
  I like your comments on the merits of IDEs vs. general utils. The overwhelming majority of people at my school use Visual Studio, they look at me funny when I use vim. I just say: "Linux is my IDE, vim is my text editor." Everything their IDEs can do, I can do with either vim alone or a combination of vim + shell/python utils. (Of course, sometimes this is too hard to do to be worthwhile, and the MS world enjoys a lot of proprietary products that have had years of maturity and don't have OSS counterparts, especially in the gaming industry; it's a seductive environment.) I use auto-completion when I think it's worthwhile, my vim supports tab completion in python files. My current exception is using Adobe's Flash Builder for Flex development since I needed to make programs now when I started, and didn't have time to learn the language+standard libs (which has consequently meant that I still don't know those things as well as if I had avoided auto-completion). Fortunately Flash Builder is built on top of Eclipse, so the occasional time I need Eclipse's integrated debugger for million line Java projects it's not a foreign interface. Yet I've never bothered to truly get used to Visual Studio, or Dreamweaver, or Delphi. To me those seem like the extraneous pieces of information I don't need since they're useless outside their very specific domains whereas vim is an investment that pays off time and time again in all sorts of areas.
njharman 15y ago
re commit to memory. I put forth that a programer's editor is the most important thing to commit to memory. Also, with vim you commit to muscle memory. Vim is "far behind he state of the art" same way Lisp is. That is it's so far beyond state of the art that it takes most editors/people years to realize what they have is just a weak / limited implementation of vim. Given that, I STRONGLY believe people's brains work different. And what may be the most awesome editor for us is not the same for you. Given that, you can not know if vim is for you without using it (daily for programming editing) for at least a year.
dredmorbius 15y ago
Here's the appeal: I first learned vi in 1986. It sucked for about 2 weeks. Then I got it. For the subsequent quarter century, I've used iterations of the same tool, as my principle editor since the mid-1990s. Since then I've used: WP4x+, WordStar, DOS EDIT, EDLIN, TSO/ISPF editor, MacWrite, MS Word in multiple incarnations, AmiPro, EVE and EDT on Vaxen, and a slew of other proprietary editors (as well as Emacs, pico/nano, ae, Lyx, AbiWord, etc.). vi/vim is a standard you'll find on any 'Nix box, from BSD to SysV4 to Linux to Mac. Ports exist on a great number of other platforms. As with other 'Nix tools, a key advantage of being a free software program is that it tends not to up and get replaced. The fundamental philosophy of vi (a full-screen curses editor based on ed with its commandset) continues through the modern incarnation (though I've got to admit that going back to old-school, un-featured 'vi' instances sucks). While the free versions are now generally available, I ended up learning and unlearning a lot of emacs when I switched to a shop that 1) didn't have it and 2) the boss wouldn't allow it to be installed (didn't know enough at the time to realize that was a prime hint to up and leave). I've saved myself having to unlearn a great deal of stuff by sticking with vi/vim. Now: if you've got an editor which works for you _and_ can offer the same promise of persistance, bully for you. But at least now you understand the appeal.
- ja27 15y ago
  I could have written this. I learned a little vi in the mid-80s and have pretty much used it ever since. No other editor has stuck with me that way and I've seen most of them - ISPF, WordStar and many derivatives, WordPerfect, etc. Except Emacs. I just never got into Emacs because every system that had Emacs also had vi. I think I spent the first few years getting to the end of a line with shift-A and Esc, copying lines by trying 13dd u 14dd u 15dd P jjjjjj p, etc. (Side note: even as I was editing this text I kept hitting ESC and bbbbbb.) I'll likely never know all the things Vim can do, but it's already enough that it's my fallback editor when I need to do a lot of editing or text manipulation.
mitchty 15y ago
I've used vi editors for longer than I remember, I don't remember any of the things I type. They just happen. I'm 30 btw, vi and its arcane "behind the state of the art" interface are only behind if you don't understand the reasons behind the separation. Every single time I login to a ssh server over a slow ssh link, I am imminently thankful I can type and update a file faster than the screen can refresh my changes. One thing for which vi excels at. Also, don't use :q!, just use ZZ, its quicker. If you want to learn how to do something vimgolf is a good choice as the goal is to do a task in as few commands as possible. Think of it as talking to your editor in as minimal a way as possible. http://vimgolf.com/ http://vimgolf.com/
- losvedir 15y ago
  > Also, don't use :q!, just use ZZ, its quicker. But ZZ is equivalent to :wq, which is different. If OP finds themself in a text file in vim by accident and started typing a word, they will likely NOT want to save those changes. (Hence OP's :q!, rather than :q.)
  - mitchty 15y ago
    If you've made changes then yes its not equivalent, keep in mind I NEVER open a file for editing unless I intend to edit. That is what view/more/less are for.
    - losvedir 15y ago
      Oh, cool! I didn't know about view, actually... I'd been using vim to poke around in files because I'm familiar with the navigation key commands, and was always keen to make sure not to edit something. But opening as read-only is great!

jvanenk 15y ago

VIM is muscle memory to me. I don't usually think about what I'm typing. I just think: 'I want this text over here' or 'I need all these phrases replaced with this new one' and then my fingers do it...like scratching an itch. That being said, one still needs to learn it to begin with. I'm lucky that I decided to sit down during college and at least learn the basics. I'm not convinced that it makes sense for every one to learn VIM or Emacs if they are perfectly proficient as they are now. For me, it's the right answer as long as I'm not pairing with some one who doesn't know VIM.

Yhippa 15y ago
I've found that using vi is like driving a manual transmission car after driving an automatic for a long time. There's a brief adjustment period but then it all comes back to me in terms of knowing how to use it. I tend to be lazy and use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible regardless of the OS I'm using. With vi it's basically heaven since they were able to make it a powerful text editor without a modern GUI.

rhizome31 15y ago

> There's only so many things one can usefully commit to memory Can you refer to any scientific research to back up that statement? My impression is that the more you use your memory, the easier it is to remember new stuff. Memory seems to be more like a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it gets, rather than a bucket that can get filled up.

robryan 15y ago
I think it's sensible if thought of as more time investment rather than how much you can commit to memory. Learning something like vim is going to take some time and is perfectly reasonable to question if there is a whole other stack of things you are also attempting to become proficient in.
- revscat 15y ago
  It is reasonable, but... I have been using vi/vim for almost 15 years now. Various technologies have come and gone (or persisted), but the underlying tool I use to make them sing has not. Early in my career I made the decision to learn vim, and it is not a decision I have ever regretted. Yes, it meant that in the beginning there were things that took me longer to do. But now? Now I can do so much more so much quicker. And after a while -- and it is not all that long of a while -- it becomes second nature. The fundamentals become a part of your fingers, just like touch typing. You no longer have to hunt and peck to type out the word "lightning". You just do it. vim's keybindings become similarly engrained. It just takes practice.
burgerbrain 15y ago
I voted you up since I agree with your muscle premise in real world situations with realistic amounts of information, but here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound ;)

irahul 15y ago

> a text editor whose interface was already far behind the state of the art when I started school? And what exactly is this state of the art you talk about? If it's the IDEs you are talking about, saying that they suck at text editing will be an understatement. Code completion, refactoring support etc isn't text editing. When I am using a language which requires a lot of boilerplate and demands an IDE, I go for some plugin which gives me vim keybindings(eclim for java, don't do much C#). Code is text at the end of the day, and something which isn't good at munging text isn't going to be my code editor. Eclipse, Visual Studio are both good tools, but they aren't good at munging text, not at all. And the boilerplate code they generate doesn't do anything to mitigate this. > So why, exactly, should I voluntarily use a text editor Because it isn't a pain in the ass like the IDEs when it comes to text editing.

davidw 15y ago
> And what exactly is this state of the art you talk about? Oh, that's easy: Emacs :-)
CJefferson 15y ago
Yes, but vim doesn't do code completion or have refactoring support, which is something I like in my IDE. Before someone tells me it does, I've had competent vim users try to get C++ support set up for me before, and it is almost worse than useless in code completion, code refactoring, and even trivial things like "jump to compiler error/warning".
- veyron 15y ago
  vim does do code completion ... For example, in my gvim, control-p shows the autocomplete list.
  - CJefferson 15y ago
    Does it work with the boost headers? Or member functions? Eclipse and VS can handle these both with ease. If you think it does, I'd be interested to know your setup, as I've never been able to get such a thing to work effectively in vim.

evilduck 15y ago

I'd say it's an old interface, but that it's still state of the art (there's a reason there's a vi/vim mode or plugin for every major editor except emacs and that you've seen a resurgence of modal editors as the programming world has moved away from boilerplate laden languages). Don't think of it as knowledge competing for headspace for languages and quirks but as knowledge that augments those arcane bits. For your :q! example, it looks daunting but you really don't end up memorizing it verbatim like that, much like you don't memorize adding semicolons verbatim to the end of your C# lines of code or adding closing tags to markup languages, it's just part of the language, a line end implicitly requires a semicolon so you just do it, vim commands are prefixed with colons so you just do that too. The q is quit, which is hardly any worse than remembering Cmd-q or Ctrl-q is quitting for OS level shortcuts and the exclamation mark means "force", so it's usually unnecessary unless you're trying to quit without saving your changes, or doing something the command otherwise wouldn't normally allow. The exclamation mark is used in tandem with other commands too, so you don't mentally remember ":q! is how I quit a file without saving changes", you memorize how to build up the command you want, "I want to issue a command, type a colon" then "I want to quit the editor, type a q", then "I want to quit without saving, so force it, type an exclamation mark". And if it really bothers you, you can configure vim to prompt you for an action if it would normally require a ! and you left it off.

irahul 15y ago
> (there's a reason there's a vi/vim mode or plugin for every major editor except emacs Viper? Vim mode? That's another story that these vim modes in emacs are hated by both emacs and vim users. I don't know who exactly they cater to.
- evilduck 15y ago
  I agree that they're usually sub-par, but it's telling that someone on every major IDE tries to address the lack of modal editing. Personally, when I'm using .Net or Java, I tend to keep the IDE open and open up gVim along side it, since it's rare for me to need the text-munging capabilities of vim simultaneously with the boilerplate/intellisense features of the IDEs.
- 15y ago

sixtofour 15y ago

"There's only so many things one can usefully commit to memory" That's similar to not learning English because the dictionary is too large to memorize. As jvanenk says elsewhere in here, it's muscle memory, not memorization. You don't "remember" how to walk or use a pencil, you just think about the goal (move body over there, write sonnet) and muscle memory takes care of the details. Most vimmers have had the experience of someone watching over their shoulder and they say "wait, how did you do that." And then you have to pause and think it through, because you yourself don't know anymore, it's just in you. It would be ludicrous to try to learn all of vim, and it's absolutely unnecessary for using vim (or any other fine grained editor) effectively. You learn what's useful to you at the moment. If you do anything a lot that irritates you, there's almost certainly something in vim (or any other power editor) that will reduce it down to a keystroke or three. I'm not saying you should learn and use vim, only that your objection (too much to learn) is misplaced.

JoshTriplett 15y ago
> Most vimmers have had the experience of someone watching over their shoulder and they say "wait, how did you do that." And then you have to pause and think it through, because you yourself don't know anymore, it's just in you. I had the interesting experience of learning vim over the course of many shared ssh+screen sessions with an experienced vim user, trying to get work done. "How'd you just do that" represents my primary method of learning for a while, and I definitely got a response of "hang on, let me try it again so I can tell you" more than once.
mun2mun 15y ago
Most vimmers have had the experience of someone watching over their shoulder and they say "wait, how did you do that." I agree wholeheartedly. Watching my colleague to code in vim is a turning event of my programming career.

chernevik 15y ago

I am but an egg, but . . . - Knowledge of vi keystrokes allows integration of automated text editing with other shell commands, as those keystrokes are scriptable. - Search and replace commands allows fine-grained specification of global texts. Tricks like "delete all lines from the start of this code block to the end" are no big deal. - vi easily incorporates the output of shell commands into the text you're editing.

ZeroGravitas 15y ago

Something that continually surprises me is how a lot of these things are interrelated historically, but people teaching these things either don't know that or don't think it's important to pass on. By which I mostly mean stuff coming through the unix tradition like grep, regex, vi-keys etc. You meet these things for the first time and think, why would I bother learning all that arcane knowledge just to do this one thing, but then later you realise that you can leverage that knowledge across a wide range of tools. Obviously you mention C# and .Net so you swim in a different pond and are less likely to see the same level of reuse, but that doesn't mean it's not there.

Goladus 15y ago

The cool thing about a good text editor is that you can use it for ALL of those things. I'm an emacs guy not a vim guy but this fundamental point is similar. Being good at vi means you're good at editing arbitrary text whether it's VB6, SQL, HTML, JavaScript, XML, wiki markup, the output of 'find' or 'ls -l', or some randomly formatted table that someone sent you in an email.

jamesrcole 15y ago

This is a matter of cost vs benefit, not memory.

X-Istence 15y ago

I have been using vim for a little while now (1+ years, so I still consider myself a newbie) and I have found that it has become second nature, I don't think about it anymore I just do. I learned how to drive a manual car a couple years ago and these days I just don't think about it anymore. I shift completely absentmindedly, it just happens. The response is built into my body, I no longer have to provide it any thought power. I've become much more productive with vim than I have with any other text editor.

erikb 15y ago

I really appreciate your comment. Anyway, this comment was not meant to convince non-vi-ers to start using vi. You don't start using vi because it has a great ":" command that you can use from line X to line Y to apply some other command to them and nobody actually expects you to (or should, at least). It was for people struggling while getting started in vi. People like me, on their way to true programming-buddhahood. Not everybody has that goal and not everybody should have. Kudos for following your path. (But also, I think that you don't need to read vi stuff because it will not give you anything, anyway)

dasil003 15y ago

Here's why I switched to vim full-time: Ubiquity across time and platforms. If you invest the knowledge to learn Vim now, it will still be useful as long as keyboards exist and are used to write programs. You can also use it whether you are on Mac, Windows, Linux or whatever future OS comes out. You can use it over a high latency flaky SSH connection surprisingly effectively. The notion of state-of-the-art is a red herring. Vim is a reasonably optimal mapping of all the keys on the keyboard to general purpose editing tasks with reasonably optimal internal grammar for combining commands in a logical way. In terms of general purpose editing, I don't think it's possible to make something "more advanced" than Vim, just different. Of course in the GUI and IDE department there are many advancements, but how much are these worth? The answer is that if you pour millions of dollars into IDEs for constrained languages like Java you are going to get some specialized tools that outperform general tools like Vim or Emacs without similar language-specific optimization. That's great as long as you stay within the approved ecosystem, but not so good if you want to venture off into a new language or DSL that doesn't have IDE support. Personally that feels stunting to me; I want to try out new technologies at will without feeling unproductive until some monolithic software package decides to catch up. Over the years through all the GUI advancements, the UNIX philosophy has proven that it still provides some of, if not the most fertile ground for creative hacking. I'd rather have 200 CLI utilities than 10,000 special purpose apps with thousands of non-orthogonal knobs and dials. Vim is a similar foundation for text editing. I can get some amazingly powerful plugins for specific uses (Fugitive makes "state of the art" git GUIs like Tower look like Playskool toys), but its bare functionality for manipulating text files is enough to get my comfortable and productive in any new language quickly, and I know I'll never have to learn a new editor for the rest of my life.

Jach 15y ago
I like your comments on the merits of IDEs vs. general utils. The overwhelming majority of people at my school use Visual Studio, they look at me funny when I use vim. I just say: "Linux is my IDE, vim is my text editor." Everything their IDEs can do, I can do with either vim alone or a combination of vim + shell/python utils. (Of course, sometimes this is too hard to do to be worthwhile, and the MS world enjoys a lot of proprietary products that have had years of maturity and don't have OSS counterparts, especially in the gaming industry; it's a seductive environment.) I use auto-completion when I think it's worthwhile, my vim supports tab completion in python files. My current exception is using Adobe's Flash Builder for Flex development since I needed to make programs now when I started, and didn't have time to learn the language+standard libs (which has consequently meant that I still don't know those things as well as if I had avoided auto-completion). Fortunately Flash Builder is built on top of Eclipse, so the occasional time I need Eclipse's integrated debugger for million line Java projects it's not a foreign interface. Yet I've never bothered to truly get used to Visual Studio, or Dreamweaver, or Delphi. To me those seem like the extraneous pieces of information I don't need since they're useless outside their very specific domains whereas vim is an investment that pays off time and time again in all sorts of areas.

njharman 15y ago

re commit to memory. I put forth that a programer's editor is the most important thing to commit to memory. Also, with vim you commit to muscle memory. Vim is "far behind he state of the art" same way Lisp is. That is it's so far beyond state of the art that it takes most editors/people years to realize what they have is just a weak / limited implementation of vim. Given that, I STRONGLY believe people's brains work different. And what may be the most awesome editor for us is not the same for you. Given that, you can not know if vim is for you without using it (daily for programming editing) for at least a year.

dredmorbius 15y ago

Here's the appeal: I first learned vi in 1986. It sucked for about 2 weeks. Then I got it. For the subsequent quarter century, I've used iterations of the same tool, as my principle editor since the mid-1990s. Since then I've used: WP4x+, WordStar, DOS EDIT, EDLIN, TSO/ISPF editor, MacWrite, MS Word in multiple incarnations, AmiPro, EVE and EDT on Vaxen, and a slew of other proprietary editors (as well as Emacs, pico/nano, ae, Lyx, AbiWord, etc.). vi/vim is a standard you'll find on any 'Nix box, from BSD to SysV4 to Linux to Mac. Ports exist on a great number of other platforms. As with other 'Nix tools, a key advantage of being a free software program is that it tends not to up and get replaced. The fundamental philosophy of vi (a full-screen curses editor based on ed with its commandset) continues through the modern incarnation (though I've got to admit that going back to old-school, un-featured 'vi' instances sucks). While the free versions are now generally available, I ended up learning and unlearning a lot of emacs when I switched to a shop that 1) didn't have it and 2) the boss wouldn't allow it to be installed (didn't know enough at the time to realize that was a prime hint to up and leave). I've saved myself having to unlearn a great deal of stuff by sticking with vi/vim. Now: if you've got an editor which works for you _and_ can offer the same promise of persistance, bully for you. But at least now you understand the appeal.

ja27 15y ago
I could have written this. I learned a little vi in the mid-80s and have pretty much used it ever since. No other editor has stuck with me that way and I've seen most of them - ISPF, WordStar and many derivatives, WordPerfect, etc. Except Emacs. I just never got into Emacs because every system that had Emacs also had vi. I think I spent the first few years getting to the end of a line with shift-A and Esc, copying lines by trying 13dd u 14dd u 15dd P jjjjjj p, etc. (Side note: even as I was editing this text I kept hitting ESC and bbbbbb.) I'll likely never know all the things Vim can do, but it's already enough that it's my fallback editor when I need to do a lot of editing or text manipulation.

mitchty 15y ago

I've used vi editors for longer than I remember, I don't remember any of the things I type. They just happen. I'm 30 btw, vi and its arcane "behind the state of the art" interface are only behind if you don't understand the reasons behind the separation. Every single time I login to a ssh server over a slow ssh link, I am imminently thankful I can type and update a file faster than the screen can refresh my changes. One thing for which vi excels at. Also, don't use :q!, just use ZZ, its quicker. If you want to learn how to do something vimgolf is a good choice as the goal is to do a task in as few commands as possible. Think of it as talking to your editor in as minimal a way as possible. http://vimgolf.com/ http://vimgolf.com/

losvedir 15y ago
> Also, don't use :q!, just use ZZ, its quicker. But ZZ is equivalent to :wq, which is different. If OP finds themself in a text file in vim by accident and started typing a word, they will likely NOT want to save those changes. (Hence OP's :q!, rather than :q.)
- mitchty 15y ago
  If you've made changes then yes its not equivalent, keep in mind I NEVER open a file for editing unless I intend to edit. That is what view/more/less are for.
  - losvedir 15y ago
    Oh, cool! I didn't know about view, actually... I'd been using vim to poke around in files because I'm familiar with the navigation key commands, and was always keen to make sure not to edit something. But opening as read-only is great!