11 ms·

Don't ever start using vi. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have vi key bindings will give you fits and make you cry. Lea

by drblast 15y ago

Don't ever start using vi. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have vi key bindings will give you fits and make you cry. Learning vi is your standard process of enlightenment and elation followed by a lifetime of disappointment. Think about how you'd feel if you ate the best meal of your life at age 13, and the restaurant where you ate it went out of business the next day. You'll be frustrated by all other software. You'll wander around trying to explain to other people why the thing you had was so good, and it was so easy, and that nothing else compares, and wouldn't it be great if everyone did things this way. Exactly like the author of this article. You have been warned.

singular 15y ago
s/vi/emacs/ ;-)
Riesling 15y ago
I feel your pain. This problem needs to be solved. See my post below[0]. Your input would be appreciated. [0]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3543011 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3543011
tomjen3 15y ago
But vi has been ported to just about anything, so why wouldn't you use it?
andrewvc 15y ago
I just switched from ViM to emacs (mostly for SLIME) after about 6 years of ViM usage, it wasn't a big deal at all, both are great.
- sjs 15y ago
  I use TextMate day to day. If I'm not on OS X I use Emacs for making software, and sometimes I use Emacs on OS X. It's great for JavaScript. Though vim is no longer my main editor I still use it every day. Right tool for the job and all that.
- wahnfrieden 15y ago
  Maybe you didn't use Vim with much depth? I know plenty of people who claim to use it but just stay in insert-mode all the time, don't use text-objects, etc. It doesn't really count if you actively avoid most things that make vim unique.
  - anthonyb 15y ago
    Maybe you shouldn't assume that people are morons? --- Clarification, since I'm getting downvoted for that: Go look at the guy's profile, and his blog. He's an experienced dev, using vim for "6 years", and he's been on HN for three, has racked up a bunch of karma, blah, blah, blah. I'm pretty sure he got past the "use vim as notepad" stage. Assuming that he hasn't is assuming that he's a moron, and contributes nothing to the discussion. How about you deal with the meat of what he's said? Something like "vim can do this thing which emacs can't" (unlikely) or "emacs does this annoying thing which vim doesn't" would be more productive than "Hey, I'm going to assume that you know nothing about vim, despite you using it for six years" Actually, that's more of a rant than a clarification, but I'll let it stand.
    - anthonyb 15y ago
      Interesting; This comment has been voted up and down since I posted it, but nobody's yet answered with something that makes vim more annoying than emacs (or vice versa).
metaobject 15y ago
Don't ever start using emacs. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have emacs key bindings will give you fits and make you cry. Learning emacs is your standard process of enlightenment and elation followed by a lifetime of disappointment. Think about how you'd feel if you ate the best meal of your life at age 13, and the restaurant where you ate it went out of business the next day. You'll be frustrated by all other software. You'll wander around trying to explain to other people why the thing you had was so good, and it was so easy, and that nothing else compares, and wouldn't it be great if everyone did things this way. You have been warned.
- burke 15y ago
  As someone who used emacs for five years before switching to vim, my personal experience was that the top-level comment is more true than this one.
  - warp 15y ago
    As someone who used emacs for 8 years, then swiched to vim and used that for 4 years, and then switched back to emacs 2 years ago -- my personal experience is that being forced to use anything which isn't vim or emacs will give me fits and make me cry, but switching from one to the other is mostly fine.
    - chc 15y ago
      As someone who always used graphical text editors with discoverable interfaces, for a long time I found both vi and emacs to be like black boxes covered in unlabeled fiddly knobs — except turning vi's knobs in the wrong order would make some of the other knobs start spinning wildly. Just trying to get either of them to use a color scheme that didn't hurt my eyes was an exercise in frustration. I can use either passably nowadays and do use both fairly frequently, but I have to admit I still find don't find either particularly nice to use. I feel like whatever is great about them is always hidden somewhere just out of sight.
    - stock_toaster 15y ago
artursapek 15y ago
But why do you stop using it in your scenario? Why does the restaurant have to go out of business?
- natesm 15y ago
  Well, I use Xcode because the performance loss in writing Objective-C without autocompletion is larger than the performance gain from using vim. However, navigation is just so painful, and "awful" is really being kind about Xcode's find/replace.
  - lftl 15y ago
    Is there no suitable vim autocomplete script for Objective-C?
    - weaksauce 15y ago
      How well does the clang autocomplete work? http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3302 http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3302
      - weaksauce 15y ago
        Cannot edit my comment but it works pretty well actually. see: http://imgur.com/6HQ13 http://imgur.com/6HQ13 quick lookup and a quick find as you type function. I like that if you press delete it will lookup the scope prior. so like if you type "addobj" and then delete a few times to "add" it will show you all the add commands again. Probably standard fare but not all implementations get this right. Install was painless and I was able to map the invocation to ctrl-space, probably a better way to do it but I did it in a few seconds without looking anything up: inoremap <c-space> <c-x><c-u>
  - blinks 15y ago
    Does http://www.corsofamily.net/jcorso/vi/ http://www.corsofamily.net/jcorso/vi/ not work for you?
Florin_Andrei 15y ago
I learned the bare minimum required to use vi. Insert, find, override-save... That's pretty much it. When vi is the only option, it's good enough; otherwise I'm free to use different editors.
- Domenic_S 15y ago
  Funny that you got downvoted. The entire industry has spent the last... forever years making things easier to use/gui-fied, and you get dinged for wanting to use those improvements.
  - staunch 15y ago
    Easier for a beginner ≠ better for an expert.
    - sukuriant 15y ago
      Better for expert != harder for beginner
      - staunch 15y ago
        It's not impossible to make tools that are easy for amateurs and powerful for professionals, but empirically it's rare. The reason is pretty simple. Take any tool, like Notepad, and start making it better for professional usage. Pretty soon it's full of features and shortcuts that help professionals and confuse amateurs. It's as it should be though. It makes good sense for professionals to spend more time upfront learning more powerful tools because the savings over their career will be massive. The amateur won't see any benefit from spending a lot of time learning if they only use the tool for a short period.
    - Florin_Andrei 15y ago
      I'm actually quite satisfied in being a perpetual "vi beginner". With regard to Linux however, I started using it (professionally too) before most people (including IT professionals) heard of it at all. I enjoy puzzling my coworkers by declaring that I am "vi-ignorant and proud of it". :) Anyway, I guess I just dislike vi because it's different from everything else. I like things that are uniform. That's what really saves a lot of time and effort in the long run. On servers, I only require a few simple things of the editor; for everything else, there's always the command line or one of the P* scripting languages. On my laptop, I can install anything I want. Never saw the point in wasting time to learn an arcane editor from the '70s.
rgraham 15y ago
Don't ever have a great experience when you're young. It'll ruin the rest of your life. Avoid it at all costs. Or maybe you'll move on and it isn't that big of a deal. You have been warned.

by drblast 15y ago

singular 15y ago

s/vi/emacs/ ;-)

Riesling 15y ago

I feel your pain. This problem needs to be solved. See my post below[0]. Your input would be appreciated. [0]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3543011 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3543011

tomjen3 15y ago

But vi has been ported to just about anything, so why wouldn't you use it?

andrewvc 15y ago

I just switched from ViM to emacs (mostly for SLIME) after about 6 years of ViM usage, it wasn't a big deal at all, both are great.

sjs 15y ago
I use TextMate day to day. If I'm not on OS X I use Emacs for making software, and sometimes I use Emacs on OS X. It's great for JavaScript. Though vim is no longer my main editor I still use it every day. Right tool for the job and all that.
wahnfrieden 15y ago
Maybe you didn't use Vim with much depth? I know plenty of people who claim to use it but just stay in insert-mode all the time, don't use text-objects, etc. It doesn't really count if you actively avoid most things that make vim unique.
- anthonyb 15y ago
  Maybe you shouldn't assume that people are morons? --- Clarification, since I'm getting downvoted for that: Go look at the guy's profile, and his blog. He's an experienced dev, using vim for "6 years", and he's been on HN for three, has racked up a bunch of karma, blah, blah, blah. I'm pretty sure he got past the "use vim as notepad" stage. Assuming that he hasn't is assuming that he's a moron, and contributes nothing to the discussion. How about you deal with the meat of what he's said? Something like "vim can do this thing which emacs can't" (unlikely) or "emacs does this annoying thing which vim doesn't" would be more productive than "Hey, I'm going to assume that you know nothing about vim, despite you using it for six years" Actually, that's more of a rant than a clarification, but I'll let it stand.
  - anthonyb 15y ago
    Interesting; This comment has been voted up and down since I posted it, but nobody's yet answered with something that makes vim more annoying than emacs (or vice versa).

metaobject 15y ago

Don't ever start using emacs. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have emacs key bindings will give you fits and make you cry. Learning emacs is your standard process of enlightenment and elation followed by a lifetime of disappointment. Think about how you'd feel if you ate the best meal of your life at age 13, and the restaurant where you ate it went out of business the next day. You'll be frustrated by all other software. You'll wander around trying to explain to other people why the thing you had was so good, and it was so easy, and that nothing else compares, and wouldn't it be great if everyone did things this way. You have been warned.

burke 15y ago
As someone who used emacs for five years before switching to vim, my personal experience was that the top-level comment is more true than this one.
- warp 15y ago
  As someone who used emacs for 8 years, then swiched to vim and used that for 4 years, and then switched back to emacs 2 years ago -- my personal experience is that being forced to use anything which isn't vim or emacs will give me fits and make me cry, but switching from one to the other is mostly fine.
  - chc 15y ago
    As someone who always used graphical text editors with discoverable interfaces, for a long time I found both vi and emacs to be like black boxes covered in unlabeled fiddly knobs — except turning vi's knobs in the wrong order would make some of the other knobs start spinning wildly. Just trying to get either of them to use a color scheme that didn't hurt my eyes was an exercise in frustration. I can use either passably nowadays and do use both fairly frequently, but I have to admit I still find don't find either particularly nice to use. I feel like whatever is great about them is always hidden somewhere just out of sight.
  - stock_toaster 15y ago

artursapek 15y ago

But why do you stop using it in your scenario? Why does the restaurant have to go out of business?

natesm 15y ago
Well, I use Xcode because the performance loss in writing Objective-C without autocompletion is larger than the performance gain from using vim. However, navigation is just so painful, and "awful" is really being kind about Xcode's find/replace.
- lftl 15y ago
  Is there no suitable vim autocomplete script for Objective-C?
  - weaksauce 15y ago
    How well does the clang autocomplete work? http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3302 http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3302
    - weaksauce 15y ago
      Cannot edit my comment but it works pretty well actually. see: http://imgur.com/6HQ13 http://imgur.com/6HQ13 quick lookup and a quick find as you type function. I like that if you press delete it will lookup the scope prior. so like if you type "addobj" and then delete a few times to "add" it will show you all the add commands again. Probably standard fare but not all implementations get this right. Install was painless and I was able to map the invocation to ctrl-space, probably a better way to do it but I did it in a few seconds without looking anything up: inoremap <c-space> <c-x><c-u>
- blinks 15y ago
  Does http://www.corsofamily.net/jcorso/vi/ http://www.corsofamily.net/jcorso/vi/ not work for you?

Florin_Andrei 15y ago

I learned the bare minimum required to use vi. Insert, find, override-save... That's pretty much it. When vi is the only option, it's good enough; otherwise I'm free to use different editors.

Domenic_S 15y ago
Funny that you got downvoted. The entire industry has spent the last... forever years making things easier to use/gui-fied, and you get dinged for wanting to use those improvements.
- staunch 15y ago
  Easier for a beginner ≠ better for an expert.
  - sukuriant 15y ago
    Better for expert != harder for beginner
    - staunch 15y ago
      It's not impossible to make tools that are easy for amateurs and powerful for professionals, but empirically it's rare. The reason is pretty simple. Take any tool, like Notepad, and start making it better for professional usage. Pretty soon it's full of features and shortcuts that help professionals and confuse amateurs. It's as it should be though. It makes good sense for professionals to spend more time upfront learning more powerful tools because the savings over their career will be massive. The amateur won't see any benefit from spending a lot of time learning if they only use the tool for a short period.
  - Florin_Andrei 15y ago
    I'm actually quite satisfied in being a perpetual "vi beginner". With regard to Linux however, I started using it (professionally too) before most people (including IT professionals) heard of it at all. I enjoy puzzling my coworkers by declaring that I am "vi-ignorant and proud of it". :) Anyway, I guess I just dislike vi because it's different from everything else. I like things that are uniform. That's what really saves a lot of time and effort in the long run. On servers, I only require a few simple things of the editor; for everything else, there's always the command line or one of the P* scripting languages. On my laptop, I can install anything I want. Never saw the point in wasting time to learn an arcane editor from the '70s.

rgraham 15y ago

Don't ever have a great experience when you're young. It'll ruin the rest of your life. Avoid it at all costs. Or maybe you'll move on and it isn't that big of a deal. You have been warned.