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I don't know why, but vim never worked for me. I tried several times to learn it, but I always forgot the shortcuts... maybe the reason is that I used it only a

I don't know why, but vim never worked for me. I tried several times to learn it, but I always forgot the shortcuts... maybe the reason is that I used it only a few times per week, to change crontab or some config file on server.

glotchimo 4y ago
Vim didn’t click for the longest time until I deleted VSCode and used it for everything. Much like with many other concepts/skills, throwing myself in the deep end worked best.
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  You could just have installed one of the vim extensions for VSCode ;) (even though it's not 'real vim', it's good enough for using both cmdline vim and vscode without the brain having to switch in and out of 'vim mode')
  - dpz 4y ago
    why swap out of vim mode, add the key bindings to everything
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    No vim emulator is "good enough" if you actually know vim, although jetbrains is probably the closest due to the configurability of it's plugin. there are almost always quirks, but the biggest issue tends to be when bridging the gap between vim and the GUI itself, particularly around the modality of vim vs graphical autocomplete. If you're less experienced as a vim user these emulators are probably perfectly fine, but as someone who has been using vim for something like 20+ years, they _always_ feel just off enough that I either just go back to vim or edit the way the editor originally intended.
  - doix 4y ago
    The problem with every fake vim plugin is that the underlying editor does not implement tabs the way vim does. Combine that with the fact that all the UI elements are not vim-ified. In vim, since everything is a pane and a buffer, you just think "I want to select the panel to the left". Regardless of if it's a plugin view or a file or whatever. In vim emulator's, that's never the case. It's really not the same, but better than nothing. The vscode plugin and the IntelliJ one are both pretty good compared to previous ones that I tried. But the IDEs are just incompatible with the vim ideology, in my opinion.
    - jrumbut 4y ago
      I also seem to run into performance problems using IDEs (even on recent, high end hardware) while vim remains fast. If nothing else, the performance characteristics of vim are predictable (to me, after all these years) and there are various ways to work around any problems that occur (disabling plug-ins, etc).
    - ketzo 4y ago
      As someone who always wanted to try Vim out, I thought the Vim keybindings plug-in was a total game changer. I only use it for moving around in and manipulating the text - because that’s all it can do - and it’s awesome. Genuine life change. Just a little counterpoint basically - I don’t think you need Vim’s entire editor model to get a lot of value out of it!
      - doix 4y ago
        I'm sure it is! But I got used to everything following vim logic, so when I use an IDE that doesn't, I miss it/get annoyed. My comment wasn't meant to dissuade anyone from trying the vim plugins. I was just trying to explain why someone would consider the vim emulation plugins not as good as the real thing.
    - yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
      I'm not sure that's the problem. I think it's more likely one of several, but I'm not sure tabs are all that useful a feature in vim — vim is all about buffers. Not once in the past eight years have I had to use tabs for something. The buffer list, yes. The argument list, yes. Tabs, no.
- josephd79 4y ago
  this.
tinco 4y ago
Yeah that's got it reversed. Vim is overkill for editing configuration files. You see people use vim for configuration files because it's there and they already know how to use it. If you really want to ease into it then simply enable the (neo) vim plugin in vscode, it's pretty good. You'll miss some big features but you'll have all the bread and butter features. Only risk is that you'll get used to some vscode features as well.
lawn 4y ago
Only a few times a week is indeed to little to get used to it. If you're serious about it, you should use it for everything and use it a lot.
yodsanklai 4y ago
I've been using vim forever. I'm fluent in editing files. But what never clicked for me is working with several buffers, making lookups across files, using ctags/lsp and so on. The right setting for me is Vim within an IDE (nowadays VSCode) but I've found it too complicated to try to turn it into an IDE. I find it appealing to be able to do all your work within tmux/vim, and I know a lot of great coders work that way but it's been too much hassle for me. I also wonder if Vim is a productivity gain at all. I like to be able to navigate/edit a file without taking off my hands from the home row, and also quickly edit a file when I'm in the terminal. But not sure it really makes that much of a difference when you know your VSCode/MacOS shortcuts, and I suppose that with proper configuration, you can also edit file remotely with VSCode and restrict the need for edition within a terminal.
- lvncelot 4y ago
  > I also wonder if Vim is a productivity gain at all. The big productivity gain for me doesn't come from faster editing due to the shortcuts, per se, but from the golden combo of modal editing and macros. Due to how you treat similar looking text in vim, macros are much more powerful than something like multi-line-cursors, which break down when you want to, for instance, delete the first part of 5 pascalCased variables with different lengths. Luckily, iirc, the vim integration in VSCode supports macros, so people who want to keep working in VSCode because of the excellent ecosystem can still have the best of both worlds.
  - mkingston 4y ago
    How would you achieve your example with macros? My inclination would be to do this with regex replace and I can't think how I'd do it with macros. I guess there's some functionality I'm missing? Jump-to-first-upper-case-character?
  - andoryuu 4y ago
    > delete the first part of 5 pascalCased variables with different lengths In VSCode there are available bindings for subword navigation (shortcuts starting with cursorWordPart).
- 4y ago
lvncelot 4y ago
It was the same for me, for a long time. I've just used vim for commit messages since I was to lazy to change $EDITOR. Then, I can't even remember why exactly, I've taken a few weeks to actually learn the basics. The first few months were a little awkward, since I wasn't as efficient as I was in Sublime Text (which I've used at the time), but I also started to miss some vim keybindings in other editors. After a while, everything clicked and now I have vim keybindings in almost every program where it's even remotely possible. (Shoutout to tridactyl[1]). I think the most important part is to slog through a couple of longer coding sessions, like you said. (Although vimtutor is a good start, as well, and a colleague of mine got started using vim adventures[2]) [1] https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl [2] https://vim-adventures.com/ https://vim-adventures.com/
_448 4y ago
> I tried several times to learn it, but I always forgot the shortcuts... If you keep at it you will develop the muscle memory. I am not an expert in Vim, but I use it whenever I want to write some code. Once I was given a coding problem to solve. The interviewer gave his laptop to me with part of the program implement and I had to complete the program. The problem was the C++ code was written in Visual Studio on Windows and I had not used that setup for a long time. So it was frustrating for me and amusing to the interviewer to see when I use to press Vim keystrokes while writing the code in VS :)
- tomkarho 4y ago
  > So it was frustrating for me and amusing to the interviewer to see when I use to press Vim keystrokes while writing the code in VS And this is why I have never been comfortable with vim or the idea learning it on that level. Why would I spend time muscle memorizing a program that conflicts so much against all other editing software and related paradigms? The skills do not scale enough to make it worth the effort imo. Sure your vim powers skyrocket but any other interface where you have to type becomes a nightmare to work with effectively. Are the advantages of working really really well with one tool worth the effort when you lose productivity in every other tool (99.9% of them) out there? Maybe if you can live constantly in vim but how many of us truly only edit text files during our day to day?
  - atarv 4y ago
    Learning vim has actually made it easier for me to use other IDEs and editors. Most of them have plugins that provide vim keybindigs for editing. Many other programs loosely follow vim bindings. For example if you enable hotkeys in GMail webclient you can use j and k keys to move between emails, press / to search just like in vim. In the comment you replied to the author was in an interview situation so they didn't have time to install any plugins.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    > Why would I spend time muscle memorizing a program that conflicts so much against all other editing software and related paradigms? Because no other editor is oriented to muscle-memorizing. > any other interface where you have to type becomes a nightmare to work with effectively. Something tells me that you are talking about some interfaces with mouse. It's really a nightmare for mine inner vimmer to get my hands out of keyboard in any other editing interface or even to look at keyboard for searching those Alt-Ctrl-Shift chords.
andrepd 4y ago
I was deep into the vim rabbit-hole for about a year and a half. Read all the guides, got all the plugins, kitted out my vimrc, all that stuff. Then one day I realised I was still more productive in sublime with its simple but powerful keybindings than I was in vim. I dropped it and never looked back.

glotchimo 4y ago

Vim didn’t click for the longest time until I deleted VSCode and used it for everything. Much like with many other concepts/skills, throwing myself in the deep end worked best.

flohofwoe 4y ago
You could just have installed one of the vim extensions for VSCode ;) (even though it's not 'real vim', it's good enough for using both cmdline vim and vscode without the brain having to switch in and out of 'vim mode')
- dpz 4y ago
  why swap out of vim mode, add the key bindings to everything
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  No vim emulator is "good enough" if you actually know vim, although jetbrains is probably the closest due to the configurability of it's plugin. there are almost always quirks, but the biggest issue tends to be when bridging the gap between vim and the GUI itself, particularly around the modality of vim vs graphical autocomplete. If you're less experienced as a vim user these emulators are probably perfectly fine, but as someone who has been using vim for something like 20+ years, they _always_ feel just off enough that I either just go back to vim or edit the way the editor originally intended.
- doix 4y ago
  The problem with every fake vim plugin is that the underlying editor does not implement tabs the way vim does. Combine that with the fact that all the UI elements are not vim-ified. In vim, since everything is a pane and a buffer, you just think "I want to select the panel to the left". Regardless of if it's a plugin view or a file or whatever. In vim emulator's, that's never the case. It's really not the same, but better than nothing. The vscode plugin and the IntelliJ one are both pretty good compared to previous ones that I tried. But the IDEs are just incompatible with the vim ideology, in my opinion.
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    I also seem to run into performance problems using IDEs (even on recent, high end hardware) while vim remains fast. If nothing else, the performance characteristics of vim are predictable (to me, after all these years) and there are various ways to work around any problems that occur (disabling plug-ins, etc).
  - ketzo 4y ago
    As someone who always wanted to try Vim out, I thought the Vim keybindings plug-in was a total game changer. I only use it for moving around in and manipulating the text - because that’s all it can do - and it’s awesome. Genuine life change. Just a little counterpoint basically - I don’t think you need Vim’s entire editor model to get a lot of value out of it!
    - doix 4y ago
      I'm sure it is! But I got used to everything following vim logic, so when I use an IDE that doesn't, I miss it/get annoyed. My comment wasn't meant to dissuade anyone from trying the vim plugins. I was just trying to explain why someone would consider the vim emulation plugins not as good as the real thing.
  - yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
    I'm not sure that's the problem. I think it's more likely one of several, but I'm not sure tabs are all that useful a feature in vim — vim is all about buffers. Not once in the past eight years have I had to use tabs for something. The buffer list, yes. The argument list, yes. Tabs, no.
josephd79 4y ago
this.

tinco 4y ago

Yeah that's got it reversed. Vim is overkill for editing configuration files. You see people use vim for configuration files because it's there and they already know how to use it. If you really want to ease into it then simply enable the (neo) vim plugin in vscode, it's pretty good. You'll miss some big features but you'll have all the bread and butter features. Only risk is that you'll get used to some vscode features as well.

lawn 4y ago

Only a few times a week is indeed to little to get used to it. If you're serious about it, you should use it for everything and use it a lot.

yodsanklai 4y ago

I've been using vim forever. I'm fluent in editing files. But what never clicked for me is working with several buffers, making lookups across files, using ctags/lsp and so on. The right setting for me is Vim within an IDE (nowadays VSCode) but I've found it too complicated to try to turn it into an IDE. I find it appealing to be able to do all your work within tmux/vim, and I know a lot of great coders work that way but it's been too much hassle for me. I also wonder if Vim is a productivity gain at all. I like to be able to navigate/edit a file without taking off my hands from the home row, and also quickly edit a file when I'm in the terminal. But not sure it really makes that much of a difference when you know your VSCode/MacOS shortcuts, and I suppose that with proper configuration, you can also edit file remotely with VSCode and restrict the need for edition within a terminal.

lvncelot 4y ago
> I also wonder if Vim is a productivity gain at all. The big productivity gain for me doesn't come from faster editing due to the shortcuts, per se, but from the golden combo of modal editing and macros. Due to how you treat similar looking text in vim, macros are much more powerful than something like multi-line-cursors, which break down when you want to, for instance, delete the first part of 5 pascalCased variables with different lengths. Luckily, iirc, the vim integration in VSCode supports macros, so people who want to keep working in VSCode because of the excellent ecosystem can still have the best of both worlds.
- mkingston 4y ago
  How would you achieve your example with macros? My inclination would be to do this with regex replace and I can't think how I'd do it with macros. I guess there's some functionality I'm missing? Jump-to-first-upper-case-character?
- andoryuu 4y ago
  > delete the first part of 5 pascalCased variables with different lengths In VSCode there are available bindings for subword navigation (shortcuts starting with cursorWordPart).
4y ago

lvncelot 4y ago

It was the same for me, for a long time. I've just used vim for commit messages since I was to lazy to change $EDITOR. Then, I can't even remember why exactly, I've taken a few weeks to actually learn the basics. The first few months were a little awkward, since I wasn't as efficient as I was in Sublime Text (which I've used at the time), but I also started to miss some vim keybindings in other editors. After a while, everything clicked and now I have vim keybindings in almost every program where it's even remotely possible. (Shoutout to tridactyl[1]). I think the most important part is to slog through a couple of longer coding sessions, like you said. (Although vimtutor is a good start, as well, and a colleague of mine got started using vim adventures[2]) [1] https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl [2] https://vim-adventures.com/ https://vim-adventures.com/

_448 4y ago

> I tried several times to learn it, but I always forgot the shortcuts... If you keep at it you will develop the muscle memory. I am not an expert in Vim, but I use it whenever I want to write some code. Once I was given a coding problem to solve. The interviewer gave his laptop to me with part of the program implement and I had to complete the program. The problem was the C++ code was written in Visual Studio on Windows and I had not used that setup for a long time. So it was frustrating for me and amusing to the interviewer to see when I use to press Vim keystrokes while writing the code in VS :)

tomkarho 4y ago
> So it was frustrating for me and amusing to the interviewer to see when I use to press Vim keystrokes while writing the code in VS And this is why I have never been comfortable with vim or the idea learning it on that level. Why would I spend time muscle memorizing a program that conflicts so much against all other editing software and related paradigms? The skills do not scale enough to make it worth the effort imo. Sure your vim powers skyrocket but any other interface where you have to type becomes a nightmare to work with effectively. Are the advantages of working really really well with one tool worth the effort when you lose productivity in every other tool (99.9% of them) out there? Maybe if you can live constantly in vim but how many of us truly only edit text files during our day to day?
- atarv 4y ago
  Learning vim has actually made it easier for me to use other IDEs and editors. Most of them have plugins that provide vim keybindigs for editing. Many other programs loosely follow vim bindings. For example if you enable hotkeys in GMail webclient you can use j and k keys to move between emails, press / to search just like in vim. In the comment you replied to the author was in an interview situation so they didn't have time to install any plugins.
- eimrine 4y ago
  > Why would I spend time muscle memorizing a program that conflicts so much against all other editing software and related paradigms? Because no other editor is oriented to muscle-memorizing. > any other interface where you have to type becomes a nightmare to work with effectively. Something tells me that you are talking about some interfaces with mouse. It's really a nightmare for mine inner vimmer to get my hands out of keyboard in any other editing interface or even to look at keyboard for searching those Alt-Ctrl-Shift chords.

andrepd 4y ago

I was deep into the vim rabbit-hole for about a year and a half. Read all the guides, got all the plugins, kitted out my vimrc, all that stuff. Then one day I realised I was still more productive in sublime with its simple but powerful keybindings than I was in vim. I dropped it and never looked back.