7 ms·

Vim for developers that use other software, too

24 points by macco 15y ago

CJefferson 15y ago
This kind of thing really appeals to me, I'm very tempted to give it a try. I have tried emacs and vim a few times, but the problem is that I don't want to use them for everything, and I have trouble getting my head around two totally different ways of working. I recently did a check of the programs I use in the average week. The current list is (in no particular order) * XCode, for Objective-C / iOS development * Eclipse, for C++ / Android * Apple Mail * Chrome * TeXShop, for Latex editing * Sublime text, for other bits of C/C++ * Vienna, for RSS reading * Evernote, for document ordering * Wunderlist, for todo lists And what is great is that all these apps share 90% of my frequently used key-presses. In particular, I'm never at a loss as to what quit/find/open/save are. Each of these tools I have found the best at what they do.
- jh3 15y ago
  You could use emacs for everything under Chrome. I don't use emacs, and probably won't because I don't feel like learning new keybindings for everything, but I hope to mess around with the org-mode clones for vim soon.
- oinksoft 15y ago
  I think that choice of editor, where you might do 80+% of your real work, should not be dictated by similarity to other tools. I'm certainly not driven from web applications when they behave radically differently from desktop applications, which are equally different from command-line tools, not to mention curses programs. Vim bindings are used in `less` and `more`. Emacs-style bindings are the default in bash and zsh.
- mziulu 15y ago
  You might have something to gain by switching to Emacs. AFAIK of the 9 elements of your list at least 6 can be easily done inside emacs. I leave out web browsing (it can be done but yeah, leaves a lot to be desired imho), Android development (ADT is really really good) and maybe "document ordering", which, depending on what it exactly is, might be done with org-mode.
  - CJefferson 15y ago
    'document ordering' is mostly gathering and organising PDFs, web links, and snippets of text. One of these days I might give emacs another go. Last time I had a look for 'quick start' emacs setups (about 3 months ago), the most recent ones I found seemed to be telling me to install the development version of emacs 24, which I couldn't even get to compile.
  - scarmig 15y ago
    One of the really cool thing about emacs is that you can do so much in it. Everything from listening to music to browsing the web. Unfortunately it lacks a decent text editor.
    - sea6ear 15y ago
      I've just been playing around with Evil-mode, an new Vim emulation mode (I've previously tried viper and vimpulse) and am finding it fairly enjoyable. I haven't pushed it really hard yet, and to be fair I could still see switching back to Vim for some things (like navigating code with ctags for example). But for things where I want to be in Emacs but hey it would be cool for this buffer to have vi key bindings, I think I like it quite well. (Enough so that I'm daydreaming about trying to contribute code to it once I understand it better).
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
mmahemoff 15y ago
What I really want, and would pay for, is a TextMate or IDE-like interface wrapped around Vim. The current plugins - e.g. NERDTree - are appreciated, but they lack the features, ease-of-use, and consistency of a purpose-built IDE. I've used various Vim emulators inside IDEs and they're just not the same as the real thing. If you know Vim well, you end up "typing on eggshells", where every keystroke might cause some unexpected chaos. So it needs to be the real thing.
- mdwrigh2 15y ago
  I wanted something like the TextMate project drawer wrapped around VIM for a long time, until I started using Command-T + ctags. I can't think of the last time I've really wanted IDE features wrapped around VIM since then (except for special cases, like visually building Android UIs in Eclipse - but even then, I don't really want that to be part of VIM).
  - Derbasti 15y ago
    Check out Project.tar.gz That plugin alone has changed the game for me. What a marvelous little thing.
- sheff 15y ago
  If you use Textmate and basically miss the project drawer in Vim, there is a version of MacVim which has that integrated ( see https://github.com/alloy/macvim/wiki/Screenshots https://github.com/alloy/macvim/wiki/Screenshots ) . There is also Vico ( http://www.vicoapp.com/ http://www.vicoapp.com/ ) which is a new Mac text editor with vi bindings, and well worth taking a look at.
  - shadowfiend 15y ago
    +1 for Vico. It's basically all I use at this point. It's still getting started, but I'm fully productive in it at this point, and have already written a couple of plugins for it. Caveat emptor: it works with TM bundles, but cannot do vim plugins.
  - 15y ago
CJefferson 15y ago
A random sidenote (because I can't be bothered to write a blog post about it). I wonder if I am the only person who feels 'vim shame' (and the closely related 'emacs shame'). 'vim shame' - the feeling that you would be a better, more productive coder if only you could master this mysterious editor, but every time you try (about once every couple of years), somewhere between two days and two weeks you find you have drifted back to textmate / sublime editor / eclipse.
- z92 15y ago
  I feel 'vim shame' too. But in some opposite way. I am ashamed of people discovering I use vim as primary editor and not some GUI-IDE. Therefore I mostly pretend like I am making quick fixes using vim when someone is hanging around.
  - CJefferson 15y ago
    Interesting, must be a culture thing. Here in academia (or to be exact, here in the computing department I am in), most people consider anything other than vim/emacs a 'toy' editor.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- Zolomon 15y ago
  I was once a victim of emacs shame. A few months after first succumbing to the shame, I got ill for two days. I couldn't lie in bed all time, so I gave Emacs all I got. It took around 20 hours in total, then I never switched back. Disclaimer: I am still conf:ing my .emacs file. :'D
  - CJefferson 15y ago
    You are one of the worst things for an emacs/vim-shame victim, the "Honest, if you keep trying, you'll get it and it will fix your life!" Just to be clear, I'm happy you enjoy your text editor :)
- 15y ago
ulisesrmzroche 15y ago
If you're just picking up Vim and using Chrome, I suggest installing Vimium to get some extra practice. Ignore recent blog posts, for the most part, that tell you to start from a vanilla config. Training wheels help. On another note, what's the vim-org mode clones looking like lately?
kenneth_reitz 15y ago
CREAM is fantastic. I used it for years, before I switched to OSX. I really wish they'd port it over, for nostalgia's sake.
benawabe896 15y ago
I've been a longtime Eclipse / Vim (when I'm ssh'ing) user. However, my Vim usage was really press i and then use arrow keys all over the place. I was even that guy that pressed i, arrowed to the right to the end of the part that I wanted to delete, and then pressed the delete key on my shortened Mac keyboard (that really behaves like a backspace) roughly doubling the keystrokes every time. When I switched jobs a month or so ago, I made it my goal to learn to use Vim the right way. All I can say is that it took me a much shorter time than expected, and the gains are greater than I could have anticipated.
lucian1900 15y ago
I don't find cream that useful. There's little interesting about vim other than the input method. Right now I'm using Emacs (for the extensibility) with Evil mode (for vim key bindings). I've used vi(m) modes in other editors as well, and some are really good. That's the direction I find more interesting.

24 points by macco 15y ago

This kind of thing really appeals to me, I'm very tempted to give it a try. I have tried emacs and vim a few times, but the problem is that I don't want to use them for everything, and I have trouble getting my head around two totally different ways of working. I recently did a check of the programs I use in the average week. The current list is (in no particular order) * XCode, for Objective-C / iOS development * Eclipse, for C++ / Android * Apple Mail * Chrome * TeXShop, for Latex editing * Sublime text, for other bits of C/C++ * Vienna, for RSS reading * Evernote, for document ordering * Wunderlist, for todo lists And what is great is that all these apps share 90% of my frequently used key-presses. In particular, I'm never at a loss as to what quit/find/open/save are. Each of these tools I have found the best at what they do.

jh3 15y ago
You could use emacs for everything under Chrome. I don't use emacs, and probably won't because I don't feel like learning new keybindings for everything, but I hope to mess around with the org-mode clones for vim soon.
oinksoft 15y ago
I think that choice of editor, where you might do 80+% of your real work, should not be dictated by similarity to other tools. I'm certainly not driven from web applications when they behave radically differently from desktop applications, which are equally different from command-line tools, not to mention curses programs. Vim bindings are used in `less` and `more`. Emacs-style bindings are the default in bash and zsh.
mziulu 15y ago
You might have something to gain by switching to Emacs. AFAIK of the 9 elements of your list at least 6 can be easily done inside emacs. I leave out web browsing (it can be done but yeah, leaves a lot to be desired imho), Android development (ADT is really really good) and maybe "document ordering", which, depending on what it exactly is, might be done with org-mode.
- CJefferson 15y ago
  'document ordering' is mostly gathering and organising PDFs, web links, and snippets of text. One of these days I might give emacs another go. Last time I had a look for 'quick start' emacs setups (about 3 months ago), the most recent ones I found seemed to be telling me to install the development version of emacs 24, which I couldn't even get to compile.
- scarmig 15y ago
  One of the really cool thing about emacs is that you can do so much in it. Everything from listening to music to browsing the web. Unfortunately it lacks a decent text editor.
  - sea6ear 15y ago
    I've just been playing around with Evil-mode, an new Vim emulation mode (I've previously tried viper and vimpulse) and am finding it fairly enjoyable. I haven't pushed it really hard yet, and to be fair I could still see switching back to Vim for some things (like navigating code with ctags for example). But for things where I want to be in Emacs but hey it would be cool for this buffer to have vi key bindings, I think I like it quite well. (Enough so that I'm daydreaming about trying to contribute code to it once I understand it better).

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

mmahemoff 15y ago

What I really want, and would pay for, is a TextMate or IDE-like interface wrapped around Vim. The current plugins - e.g. NERDTree - are appreciated, but they lack the features, ease-of-use, and consistency of a purpose-built IDE. I've used various Vim emulators inside IDEs and they're just not the same as the real thing. If you know Vim well, you end up "typing on eggshells", where every keystroke might cause some unexpected chaos. So it needs to be the real thing.

mdwrigh2 15y ago
I wanted something like the TextMate project drawer wrapped around VIM for a long time, until I started using Command-T + ctags. I can't think of the last time I've really wanted IDE features wrapped around VIM since then (except for special cases, like visually building Android UIs in Eclipse - but even then, I don't really want that to be part of VIM).
- Derbasti 15y ago
  Check out Project.tar.gz That plugin alone has changed the game for me. What a marvelous little thing.
sheff 15y ago
If you use Textmate and basically miss the project drawer in Vim, there is a version of MacVim which has that integrated ( see https://github.com/alloy/macvim/wiki/Screenshots https://github.com/alloy/macvim/wiki/Screenshots ) . There is also Vico ( http://www.vicoapp.com/ http://www.vicoapp.com/ ) which is a new Mac text editor with vi bindings, and well worth taking a look at.
- shadowfiend 15y ago
  +1 for Vico. It's basically all I use at this point. It's still getting started, but I'm fully productive in it at this point, and have already written a couple of plugins for it. Caveat emptor: it works with TM bundles, but cannot do vim plugins.
- 15y ago

CJefferson 15y ago

A random sidenote (because I can't be bothered to write a blog post about it). I wonder if I am the only person who feels 'vim shame' (and the closely related 'emacs shame'). 'vim shame' - the feeling that you would be a better, more productive coder if only you could master this mysterious editor, but every time you try (about once every couple of years), somewhere between two days and two weeks you find you have drifted back to textmate / sublime editor / eclipse.

z92 15y ago
I feel 'vim shame' too. But in some opposite way. I am ashamed of people discovering I use vim as primary editor and not some GUI-IDE. Therefore I mostly pretend like I am making quick fixes using vim when someone is hanging around.
- CJefferson 15y ago
  Interesting, must be a culture thing. Here in academia (or to be exact, here in the computing department I am in), most people consider anything other than vim/emacs a 'toy' editor.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
Zolomon 15y ago
I was once a victim of emacs shame. A few months after first succumbing to the shame, I got ill for two days. I couldn't lie in bed all time, so I gave Emacs all I got. It took around 20 hours in total, then I never switched back. Disclaimer: I am still conf:ing my .emacs file. :'D
- CJefferson 15y ago
  You are one of the worst things for an emacs/vim-shame victim, the "Honest, if you keep trying, you'll get it and it will fix your life!" Just to be clear, I'm happy you enjoy your text editor :)
15y ago

ulisesrmzroche 15y ago

If you're just picking up Vim and using Chrome, I suggest installing Vimium to get some extra practice. Ignore recent blog posts, for the most part, that tell you to start from a vanilla config. Training wheels help. On another note, what's the vim-org mode clones looking like lately?

kenneth_reitz 15y ago

CREAM is fantastic. I used it for years, before I switched to OSX. I really wish they'd port it over, for nostalgia's sake.

benawabe896 15y ago

I've been a longtime Eclipse / Vim (when I'm ssh'ing) user. However, my Vim usage was really press i and then use arrow keys all over the place. I was even that guy that pressed i, arrowed to the right to the end of the part that I wanted to delete, and then pressed the delete key on my shortened Mac keyboard (that really behaves like a backspace) roughly doubling the keystrokes every time. When I switched jobs a month or so ago, I made it my goal to learn to use Vim the right way. All I can say is that it took me a much shorter time than expected, and the gains are greater than I could have anticipated.

lucian1900 15y ago

I don't find cream that useful. There's little interesting about vim other than the input method. Right now I'm using Emacs (for the extensibility) with Evil mode (for vim key bindings). I've used vi(m) modes in other editors as well, and some are really good. That's the direction I find more interesting.