5 ms·

I actually use Vim like this, in fact I wrote a plugin to go all the way and make it a completely "normal" editor [1]. It's endlessly surprising to me that sti

by tombh 5y ago

I actually use Vim like this, in fact I wrote a plugin to go all the way and make it a completely "normal" editor [1]. It's endlessly surprising to me that still to this day Vim is most commonly considered through the lens of its keybindings. It's sooo much more than that! It's a lightweight terminal editor with one of the largest, if not the largest ecosystems of pioneering extensions. It really shouldn't be weird that you'd want to take advantage of all that without having to submit to the religion of modal editing. 1. https://github.com/tombh/novim-mode https://github.com/tombh/novim-mode

qudat 5y ago
> if not the largest ecosystems of pioneering extensions Agreed! And the neovim plug-in ecosystem is blowing up because of its support for lua: https://neovimcraft.com https://neovimcraft.com
asicsp 5y ago
Nice. There's a lot I've learned in this thread :)
scelerat 5y ago
> having to submit to the religion of modal editing ha but that is indeed why i'm here at all
- Aperocky 5y ago
  As I look about in the temple of vim, I see dedicated believers of modal editing, they are the good ones. I also see the heretics who are just here to take advantage of INSERT mode, the heathens who come to insult our ancient religion, and spies from church of emacs. I find their lack of faith disturbing.
  - acomjean 5y ago
    Don't get me started on the Evil Mode emacs users, trying to have it both ways. https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil
    - bastijn 5y ago
      Did somebody say Spacemacs? [0] https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/
      - weaksauce 5y ago
        spacemacs is great but doom is night and day faster. I use doom for just magit now and the startup time is almost negligible and the other affordances are still there if you want them. spacemacs has a maintainer problem and some serious debt that needs to be paid before it is a worthy contender in my opinion. the whole you need to run on dev branch and it's many (thousands?) of commits ahead of the main branch and having many many stale/outdated/broken issues is not tenable.
        archduck 5y ago
        Fortunately, we won't have to wait for a fix much longer: Version 0.300 is almost out. (Note: I am not responsible for any irreparably cracked teeth, chunk-wise hair loss, or overexertion-onset voice loss sustained from reading this comment.)
  - Yizahi 5y ago
    Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you try to exit VIM. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal VIIIIiiiIIMMMmmm... static
alpaca128 5y ago
That's why I can't ever get used to Vim plugins in other editors. They assume the modal controls are what defines this editor, while in truth that's just the obvious tip of the iceberg and all other aspects are ignored. For me Vim means no clutter, distractions or "help" nobody asked for, performance, a powerful yet simple system for keybindings, and keyboard controls that cover 100% of the functionality.
- weaksauce 5y ago
  It's nice to have the power of vim on top of an already powerful editor with nice defaults baked in and an easy ecosystem of extensions that all play well with the gui underpinnings of your os. I use neovim as a server and vscode as the editor. basically anything in normal mode is passed through unadulterated and you have a full neovim backend. it's pretty close to great. some edge cases that kinda annoy you here and there but overall it's great.
  - newlisp 5y ago
    purists are going to be purist for sake of purism only.
    - tjoff 5y ago
      There are plenty of other reasons... Neovim in vscode is pretty great but it is still quite hindered behind vscode. It is also easy to get in weird mental states when the editor panes and other vscode panes behave drastically different.
      - newlisp 5y ago
        That's true, but IMO is just a matter of accustoming oneself to some new ways of doing things, as long as the tradeoff is worth it for you.
    - alpaca128 5y ago
      Vim is the only editor with powerful & modern features that doesn't distract me all the time. I'm not a purist, I just like being productive. I get why many people prefer an IDE or something like VS Code, but I don't enjoy using them. From my perspective they're a downgrade in almost every aspect.
dandotway 5y ago
I tried to make vim work like VSCodium (VSCode on telemetry diet), but found it too hard and gave up. 1. How well do you handle the mouse in xterm? Vim actually has fantastic mouse support in xterm (:set mouse=a), e.g. you can use focus-follows-mouse scrollwheel to scroll individual split content panes, drag click to resize the split dividers, etc. (Although, last time I tried under WSL with the old-school win-console, vim's focus-follow-mouse scrollwheel scrolling didn't work there whereas emacs did work (with xterm-mouse-mode)). 2. Can you handle multiple cursors gracefully (vim-visual-multi) with the mouse like VSCodium? Emacs doesn't have a non-buggy multi-cursor mode and I gave up on achieving this with Emacs. I just use VSCodium now, which means allocating over 300MB of system RAM and gigabytes of dedicated graphics VRAM for its 'HW accelerated' rendering that decelerates all other HW graphics rendering on my machine.
- Arch-TK 5y ago
  You can achieve a significant portion (if not more) of the things that people use multiple cursors for in other editors (or even in vim) with just plain vim regular expressions and other features. Every time I've used multiple-cursors (either in vim or other editors) I've found it just plain slower, less precise and less powerful than plain vim commands. I would recommend looking at the features vim has to offer and learning them to see if maybe they can make up for the lack of native multiple-cursors support.
  - dandotway 5y ago
    The Acme editor, used by C creator Dennis Ritchie, converted me to the Rodent Religion. The mouse is the fastest way to point to something on your computer screen, especially a quality gaming mouse with mouse acceleration disabled. Pointing at things on a computer screen and clicking is a highly competitive activity involving billions of dollars annually; pro gaming mouse designs have evolved to be lightweight and extremely efficient at this task. Pianists can rapidly move their hands to 100% accurately strike keys more than a foot away at blink-of-the-eye speed because they practice, and master mouse users can flick their hand from keyboard to mouse to keyboard again at blink-of-the-eye speed if they practice. Anchoring at the keyboard is not the fastest way to edit text. There needs to be a text editing competition organized with prize money. Then shall all the world see that mouse users best the Rodentless in battle. If I need to double-backspace five different caret positions visible on screen, I can Ctrl-click (or Alt-click) to set multiple cursors faster than a master vimmer's brain can devise a suitable ':[x,y]s/.../.../g' command to accomplish the same thing. I know this because I've used vim more than 20 years, and I also learned ed's and sam's editing languages used by the original Unix gods. The Unix gods switched to the Sam editor in the early 1980s which is a bit like a mouse-oriented re-imagining of vi. Then some switched to Plan 9's Acme in the 1990s, which retains Sam's editing language. The Sam/Acme editing language is not line-oriented like ed/vi/vim, e.g. ':#3,#42' selects character 3 through 42 regardless of how many newlines are between char 3 and 42 and does not select to the beginning of the line before char 3 nor to the end of the line after char 42. You can also do ':/re1/,/re2/' and unlike vim this won't grab to the beginning of line before /re1/, etc. Acme doesn't have multiple cursors though and needs some TLC, it doesn't talk to an X server efficiently and draw pixels efficiently because it's based on Plan 9's drawterm. VSCodium does everything I need but is ultra-bloated and I'd love lighter weight.
metalliqaz 5y ago
There used to be a plugin called Cream for Vim that did something like this. I quite liked it for quick GUI edit tasks. Edit: looks like it maintenance stopped about 10 years ago http://cream.sourceforge.net/ http://cream.sourceforge.net/
barbs 5y ago
I'm actually endlessly surprised myself that you primarily use Vim this way. For me, Vim's keybindings are what make Vim, Vim. That said, one of the first things I do when trying a new IDE is find and download the Vim keybindings plugin, so most of my Vim usage is not actually in the editor itself. In a way, you're more a fan of the editor than I am! Very interesting to see this. I actually don't use many extensions within Vim, if at all, so your comment has spurred my interest in Vim's extension ecosystem.

by tombh 5y ago

qudat 5y ago

> if not the largest ecosystems of pioneering extensions Agreed! And the neovim plug-in ecosystem is blowing up because of its support for lua: https://neovimcraft.com https://neovimcraft.com

asicsp 5y ago

Nice. There's a lot I've learned in this thread :)

scelerat 5y ago

> having to submit to the religion of modal editing ha but that is indeed why i'm here at all

Aperocky 5y ago
As I look about in the temple of vim, I see dedicated believers of modal editing, they are the good ones. I also see the heretics who are just here to take advantage of INSERT mode, the heathens who come to insult our ancient religion, and spies from church of emacs. I find their lack of faith disturbing.
- acomjean 5y ago
  Don't get me started on the Evil Mode emacs users, trying to have it both ways. https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil
  - bastijn 5y ago
    Did somebody say Spacemacs? [0] https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/
    - weaksauce 5y ago
      spacemacs is great but doom is night and day faster. I use doom for just magit now and the startup time is almost negligible and the other affordances are still there if you want them. spacemacs has a maintainer problem and some serious debt that needs to be paid before it is a worthy contender in my opinion. the whole you need to run on dev branch and it's many (thousands?) of commits ahead of the main branch and having many many stale/outdated/broken issues is not tenable.
      - archduck 5y ago
        Fortunately, we won't have to wait for a fix much longer: Version 0.300 is almost out. (Note: I am not responsible for any irreparably cracked teeth, chunk-wise hair loss, or overexertion-onset voice loss sustained from reading this comment.)
- Yizahi 5y ago
  Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you try to exit VIM. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal VIIIIiiiIIMMMmmm... static

alpaca128 5y ago

That's why I can't ever get used to Vim plugins in other editors. They assume the modal controls are what defines this editor, while in truth that's just the obvious tip of the iceberg and all other aspects are ignored. For me Vim means no clutter, distractions or "help" nobody asked for, performance, a powerful yet simple system for keybindings, and keyboard controls that cover 100% of the functionality.

weaksauce 5y ago
It's nice to have the power of vim on top of an already powerful editor with nice defaults baked in and an easy ecosystem of extensions that all play well with the gui underpinnings of your os. I use neovim as a server and vscode as the editor. basically anything in normal mode is passed through unadulterated and you have a full neovim backend. it's pretty close to great. some edge cases that kinda annoy you here and there but overall it's great.
- newlisp 5y ago
  purists are going to be purist for sake of purism only.
  - tjoff 5y ago
    There are plenty of other reasons... Neovim in vscode is pretty great but it is still quite hindered behind vscode. It is also easy to get in weird mental states when the editor panes and other vscode panes behave drastically different.
    - newlisp 5y ago
      That's true, but IMO is just a matter of accustoming oneself to some new ways of doing things, as long as the tradeoff is worth it for you.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    Vim is the only editor with powerful & modern features that doesn't distract me all the time. I'm not a purist, I just like being productive. I get why many people prefer an IDE or something like VS Code, but I don't enjoy using them. From my perspective they're a downgrade in almost every aspect.

dandotway 5y ago

I tried to make vim work like VSCodium (VSCode on telemetry diet), but found it too hard and gave up. 1. How well do you handle the mouse in xterm? Vim actually has fantastic mouse support in xterm (:set mouse=a), e.g. you can use focus-follows-mouse scrollwheel to scroll individual split content panes, drag click to resize the split dividers, etc. (Although, last time I tried under WSL with the old-school win-console, vim's focus-follow-mouse scrollwheel scrolling didn't work there whereas emacs did work (with xterm-mouse-mode)). 2. Can you handle multiple cursors gracefully (vim-visual-multi) with the mouse like VSCodium? Emacs doesn't have a non-buggy multi-cursor mode and I gave up on achieving this with Emacs. I just use VSCodium now, which means allocating over 300MB of system RAM and gigabytes of dedicated graphics VRAM for its 'HW accelerated' rendering that decelerates all other HW graphics rendering on my machine.

Arch-TK 5y ago
You can achieve a significant portion (if not more) of the things that people use multiple cursors for in other editors (or even in vim) with just plain vim regular expressions and other features. Every time I've used multiple-cursors (either in vim or other editors) I've found it just plain slower, less precise and less powerful than plain vim commands. I would recommend looking at the features vim has to offer and learning them to see if maybe they can make up for the lack of native multiple-cursors support.
- dandotway 5y ago
  The Acme editor, used by C creator Dennis Ritchie, converted me to the Rodent Religion. The mouse is the fastest way to point to something on your computer screen, especially a quality gaming mouse with mouse acceleration disabled. Pointing at things on a computer screen and clicking is a highly competitive activity involving billions of dollars annually; pro gaming mouse designs have evolved to be lightweight and extremely efficient at this task. Pianists can rapidly move their hands to 100% accurately strike keys more than a foot away at blink-of-the-eye speed because they practice, and master mouse users can flick their hand from keyboard to mouse to keyboard again at blink-of-the-eye speed if they practice. Anchoring at the keyboard is not the fastest way to edit text. There needs to be a text editing competition organized with prize money. Then shall all the world see that mouse users best the Rodentless in battle. If I need to double-backspace five different caret positions visible on screen, I can Ctrl-click (or Alt-click) to set multiple cursors faster than a master vimmer's brain can devise a suitable ':[x,y]s/.../.../g' command to accomplish the same thing. I know this because I've used vim more than 20 years, and I also learned ed's and sam's editing languages used by the original Unix gods. The Unix gods switched to the Sam editor in the early 1980s which is a bit like a mouse-oriented re-imagining of vi. Then some switched to Plan 9's Acme in the 1990s, which retains Sam's editing language. The Sam/Acme editing language is not line-oriented like ed/vi/vim, e.g. ':#3,#42' selects character 3 through 42 regardless of how many newlines are between char 3 and 42 and does not select to the beginning of the line before char 3 nor to the end of the line after char 42. You can also do ':/re1/,/re2/' and unlike vim this won't grab to the beginning of line before /re1/, etc. Acme doesn't have multiple cursors though and needs some TLC, it doesn't talk to an X server efficiently and draw pixels efficiently because it's based on Plan 9's drawterm. VSCodium does everything I need but is ultra-bloated and I'd love lighter weight.

metalliqaz 5y ago

There used to be a plugin called Cream for Vim that did something like this. I quite liked it for quick GUI edit tasks. Edit: looks like it maintenance stopped about 10 years ago http://cream.sourceforge.net/ http://cream.sourceforge.net/

barbs 5y ago

I'm actually endlessly surprised myself that you primarily use Vim this way. For me, Vim's keybindings are what make Vim, Vim. That said, one of the first things I do when trying a new IDE is find and download the Vim keybindings plugin, so most of my Vim usage is not actually in the editor itself. In a way, you're more a fan of the editor than I am! Very interesting to see this. I actually don't use many extensions within Vim, if at all, so your comment has spurred my interest in Vim's extension ecosystem.