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I can’t recommend enough the book Practical Vim by Drew Neil. Vim isn’t hard, and it’s faster than everything else. Vim is the one true editor (except for tha

I can’t recommend enough the book Practical Vim by Drew Neil. Vim isn’t hard, and it’s faster than everything else. Vim is the one true editor (except for that other one true editor which is also ok).

edgyquant 5y ago
I still use vim quite a bit, especially because I live in the terminal, but the last few years I’ve been converted to VSCode for my IDE. I still live in the terminal just within VSCode.
synergy20 5y ago
bought and used many IDEs (still owns all jetbrains stuff) but 99% of the time I'm using vim for everything. it does have a learning curve and took a while to settle down all those key bindings with plugins. once you past that point, it never stands in the way, and I don't need move my fingers away from the keyboard to pick the mouse and click here and there then move my hands back to keyboard anymore.
- iamcreasy 5y ago
  Is Vim with plugin still as good when you have to switch between multiple languages with good debugging support? or some languages/plugins are better supported than other?
  - ngngngng 5y ago
    I mostly use copilot and the most popular LSP for any language I'm developing. And I mostly write Go and Python. Any mature, popular language will have plenty of tooling and plugins for you to work with, but not all tooling is created equal. For me, everything works much better in Go than in Python. Copilot suggestions are far more useful, the LSP has a lot more useful info to give me, etc. There are a couple "flavors" of neovim that do a lot of the heavy lifting for you as far as plugin setup to give you a better initial setup experience, otherwise you will need to put in some work to finding all the plugins you want, and some of that work will need to be repeated for each language you want to write.
shroompasta 5y ago
Vim, to me, has been unproductive. I spent about 4 months on it daily unable to get up to speed how I was originally. This may just speak to my own inabilities of muscle memory, and granted, If I used Vim a little younger, I think the outcome would be different. But the thing is, I'm productive enough. Furthermore, I found the mouse to be faster in many cases - I only believe the top 10% of vim users who have spent countless hours tailoring their config to be the most "productive" in terms of typing. I say productive in terms of typing, because when we code, a grand majority of our productivity actually comes from our brain. Squeezing out additional wpm actually has very little relevance to productivity. But looking at seasoned Vim users looks cool though, and it definitely does give those style points.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- threatofrain 5y ago
  I've used Vim for many years and I don't recommend people learn it. The things which make Vim strong (cross-platform, plugin ecosystem) has been subsumed by VSC for the most part, and what is left is Vim's unique philosophy of text editing, which by itself is an incredibly modest proposition.
  - peakaboo 5y ago
    Software like VS Code lives in cycles. It's popular now but you will see it being less popular every year. People will notice how it grows slower, buggier, and probably some unpopular decisions by Microsoft will annoy users. This is the default path for big software. Vim will always be there and because it's not backed by big tech, it will continue to be modular, fast and modern. Much like Linux, learning it means you are free, powerful and you will not get affected by the whims of big tech. This is very valuable. Every year you use free software, you invest time in skills that won't go away and will support you for life.
    - aidos 5y ago
      Yup, that's also why I decided to get good in vim. I was pretty happy in TextMate at the time, but the popularity tide had turned as he was working on TextMate2. The writing appeared to be on the wall, so I learnt vim properly. Sublime took over, then came Atom, now VSCode. Neovim is home for me now, and that's been a whole other beast to configure, but vim has just been such a stable, efficient environment for me for almost 15 years now.

edgyquant 5y ago

I still use vim quite a bit, especially because I live in the terminal, but the last few years I’ve been converted to VSCode for my IDE. I still live in the terminal just within VSCode.

synergy20 5y ago

bought and used many IDEs (still owns all jetbrains stuff) but 99% of the time I'm using vim for everything. it does have a learning curve and took a while to settle down all those key bindings with plugins. once you past that point, it never stands in the way, and I don't need move my fingers away from the keyboard to pick the mouse and click here and there then move my hands back to keyboard anymore.

iamcreasy 5y ago
Is Vim with plugin still as good when you have to switch between multiple languages with good debugging support? or some languages/plugins are better supported than other?
- ngngngng 5y ago
  I mostly use copilot and the most popular LSP for any language I'm developing. And I mostly write Go and Python. Any mature, popular language will have plenty of tooling and plugins for you to work with, but not all tooling is created equal. For me, everything works much better in Go than in Python. Copilot suggestions are far more useful, the LSP has a lot more useful info to give me, etc. There are a couple "flavors" of neovim that do a lot of the heavy lifting for you as far as plugin setup to give you a better initial setup experience, otherwise you will need to put in some work to finding all the plugins you want, and some of that work will need to be repeated for each language you want to write.

shroompasta 5y ago

Vim, to me, has been unproductive. I spent about 4 months on it daily unable to get up to speed how I was originally. This may just speak to my own inabilities of muscle memory, and granted, If I used Vim a little younger, I think the outcome would be different. But the thing is, I'm productive enough. Furthermore, I found the mouse to be faster in many cases - I only believe the top 10% of vim users who have spent countless hours tailoring their config to be the most "productive" in terms of typing. I say productive in terms of typing, because when we code, a grand majority of our productivity actually comes from our brain. Squeezing out additional wpm actually has very little relevance to productivity. But looking at seasoned Vim users looks cool though, and it definitely does give those style points.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
threatofrain 5y ago
I've used Vim for many years and I don't recommend people learn it. The things which make Vim strong (cross-platform, plugin ecosystem) has been subsumed by VSC for the most part, and what is left is Vim's unique philosophy of text editing, which by itself is an incredibly modest proposition.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  Software like VS Code lives in cycles. It's popular now but you will see it being less popular every year. People will notice how it grows slower, buggier, and probably some unpopular decisions by Microsoft will annoy users. This is the default path for big software. Vim will always be there and because it's not backed by big tech, it will continue to be modular, fast and modern. Much like Linux, learning it means you are free, powerful and you will not get affected by the whims of big tech. This is very valuable. Every year you use free software, you invest time in skills that won't go away and will support you for life.
  - aidos 5y ago
    Yup, that's also why I decided to get good in vim. I was pretty happy in TextMate at the time, but the popularity tide had turned as he was working on TextMate2. The writing appeared to be on the wall, so I learnt vim properly. Sublime took over, then came Atom, now VSCode. Neovim is home for me now, and that's been a whole other beast to configure, but vim has just been such a stable, efficient environment for me for almost 15 years now.