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Vim is neither a text editor nor a code editor. Vim is a language. To speak Vim is to speak in a way with your hands that turns words into action and moves tex
by xwdv 4y ago
Vim is neither a text editor nor a code editor.
Vim is a language. To speak Vim is to speak in a way with your hands that turns words into action and moves text at the speed of thought.
I have long mastered Vim after over a decade of experience. I can barely tell you what keys I’m pressing, but when I imagine some text in my head and how I’d want to change it, I feel the force at the ends of my fingers that guides my hands until the modification is done.
Much like how you can speak to express an idea without having to think about the way your mouth moves, I can easily edit blocks of code without really knowing how my hands will move, I simply trust they will do what I need and it happens. Vim has become the interface by which my mind can directly immerse itself into the conversation of code on a screen. Most will never understand the feeling of this power unless they deliberately pursue deep mastery of Vim, but once you’ve gotten a taste of it, it becomes intoxicating.
Vim is well worth investing your time in. I guarantee it is one technology that will exist for the rest of your career. The year will be 2100, and Vim will still be around and in use by the best engineers.
- probablynish 4y agoWhat do you think of using vim plugins inside an IDE, such as IdeaVIM? How much of the benefits of what you describe do you think would remain? I've been trying to spend more time in vim since last year because I can imagine a world with the benefits you describe, and I want to put in the long-run investment to get there. But at the same time, Vim naturally lacks the feature set of an IDE, and setting up a bunch of plug-ins so that they all work together is somewhat time consuming and brittle. I've been wondering if I should stick to Jetbrains/VS Code and use Vim as a text manipulation language, and whether I'd still attain that editing fluency you describe.
- xwdv 4y agoPlug-ins are always a personal choice. For me the most essential is fuzzy finder with ctrl-P. With this I can arrive at any file or line in a massive codebase damn near instantly. I find vim with the right plugins is as capable as any IDE, you can at least have the basics like autocomplete and various syntax highlighters and linters. Personally I think developers who lean heavily on the IDE features of more common tools are using it as a crutch for not knowing the codebase very well or language features. Part of the journey to vim mastery is the configuration of vim until it fits you like a glove, once you’ve configured it well you rarely need to touch the config files again.