5 ms·

You use vi on a smartphone? I love vim, but I think it would be excruciating without a full keyboard.

by billybob 15y ago

z92 15y ago
I thought vim was a better choice, specially when you don't have a full keyboard. No need for arrow keys or Home, End.
lucian1900 15y ago
Smartphones with physical keyboards are sweet.
zerostar07 15y ago
Only when something is broken, it's actually more usable on a phone terminal than any other editor i can think of.
mike-cardwell 15y ago
My last three phones have had qwerty keyboards. The Nokia E90, a G1 and now a HTC Desire Z. Typing on them is so much easier than using a touch screen. I regularly tap out emails and use ssh and vi on mine.
- jebberjeb 15y ago
  IMO anyone performing useful work at the command line using a phone keyboard is hard core! (I use the logitech android bluetooth keyboard)
exDM69 15y ago
I have been using Vim over ssh with my Nokia N900 not-so-smart-phone, and it works great compared to anything else I can think of. The phone has a physical qwerty keyboard but it does not have all the non-alphabetic keys you'd want and esc, ctrl and some other keys are accessed via touchscreen. I have made some key mappings in Vim to get my non-US native keyboards keys that are normally not used in coding do something meaningful. I have ö and ä mapped to curly/square brackets, å is another escape and 0 and + (next to each other on the number row) are home and end. This makes it pretty convenient to write code on a qwerty keyboard and it also works nicely with a laggy phone internet connection over ssh.
- dave1010uk 15y ago
  I had a N900 and used to write lots of code in nano. It had python, ruby and PHP and was a great tool for quickly coding ideas or scraping and grepping web APIs. It ran vi and emacs too but I never really used them. Now I have an Android device that's 5x faster and 10 more usable as a phone but I've only written about 10 lines of code in total on it's virtual keyboard. Hoping my next phone combines the best of both worlds.
moe 15y ago
I love vim, but I think it would be excruciating without a full keyboard. Wait, what? Vi is actually the only editor that is bearable on a smartphone because most other editors depend on key-combinations (e.g. Control + X) that are painful to type on a touchscreen. For vim you only need qwerty + escape and you're set.
jodrellblank 15y ago
http://bbssh.org http://bbssh.org for SSH (and, subsequently, vim) on a Blackberry.

You use vi on a smartphone? I love vim, but I think it would be excruciating without a full keyboard.

z92 15y ago

I thought vim was a better choice, specially when you don't have a full keyboard. No need for arrow keys or Home, End.

lucian1900 15y ago

Smartphones with physical keyboards are sweet.

zerostar07 15y ago

Only when something is broken, it's actually more usable on a phone terminal than any other editor i can think of.

mike-cardwell 15y ago

My last three phones have had qwerty keyboards. The Nokia E90, a G1 and now a HTC Desire Z. Typing on them is so much easier than using a touch screen. I regularly tap out emails and use ssh and vi on mine.

jebberjeb 15y ago
IMO anyone performing useful work at the command line using a phone keyboard is hard core! (I use the logitech android bluetooth keyboard)

exDM69 15y ago

I have been using Vim over ssh with my Nokia N900 not-so-smart-phone, and it works great compared to anything else I can think of. The phone has a physical qwerty keyboard but it does not have all the non-alphabetic keys you'd want and esc, ctrl and some other keys are accessed via touchscreen. I have made some key mappings in Vim to get my non-US native keyboards keys that are normally not used in coding do something meaningful. I have ö and ä mapped to curly/square brackets, å is another escape and 0 and + (next to each other on the number row) are home and end. This makes it pretty convenient to write code on a qwerty keyboard and it also works nicely with a laggy phone internet connection over ssh.

dave1010uk 15y ago
I had a N900 and used to write lots of code in nano. It had python, ruby and PHP and was a great tool for quickly coding ideas or scraping and grepping web APIs. It ran vi and emacs too but I never really used them. Now I have an Android device that's 5x faster and 10 more usable as a phone but I've only written about 10 lines of code in total on it's virtual keyboard. Hoping my next phone combines the best of both worlds.

moe 15y ago

I love vim, but I think it would be excruciating without a full keyboard. Wait, what? Vi is actually the only editor that is bearable on a smartphone because most other editors depend on key-combinations (e.g. Control + X) that are painful to type on a touchscreen. For vim you only need qwerty + escape and you're set.

jodrellblank 15y ago

http://bbssh.org http://bbssh.org for SSH (and, subsequently, vim) on a Blackberry.