13 ms·

VsVim

130 points by mmavnn 15y ago

germano 15y ago
If there's anyone out there comfortable in both the way of vi and the way of Emacs, does this feel better than the Emacs emulation [1]? I'd love to be able to work with text more efficiently in Visual Studio, but the Emacs emulation feels only half way there. [1] http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/09dc58c4-6f47-413a-9176-742be7463f92 http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/09dc58c4-6f47-...
- jugglingnutcase 15y ago
  i used to use the emacs emulation and i agree with you, it only felt halfway. Also, Jared seems way more responsive than the emacs people. i filed a few bug reports and saw few status updates or general updates. After feeling frustrated with that and the half-baked feel i switched to Vim and found VsVim. i've been really happy and havent looked back.
jcfrei 15y ago
there was a similiar plugin for eclipse around, called eclim.
- ch0wn 15y ago
  Isn't Eclim the other way around? I thought it would include features from Eclipse in Vim rather than bringing key Vim keybindings to Eclipse. There are several plugins for the latter though, like Vrapper[0] or ViPlugin[1]. There were also attempts to integrate a whole native Vim instance into eclipse[2]. [0] http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/ http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/ [1] http://www.viplugin.com/viplugin/ http://www.viplugin.com/viplugin/ [2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/vimplugin/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/vimplugin/
  - jcfrei 15y ago
    check their page; what I meant specifically was the ability to run vim inside of eclipse.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - spwmoni 15y ago
      "The primary goal of eclim is to bring Eclipse functionality to the Vim editor." Maybe you're talking about vimplugin, which eclim uses a fork of to embed gvim in eclipse?
- drKarl 15y ago
  And Vrapper
johnfn 15y ago
This seems to be a part of a nascent trend in IDEs. There's vrapper and eclim for eclipse, Vintage for Sublime Text, and now this as well. I've seen a lot of arguments about how people don't use IDEs because vim/emacs are better, and I always felt they were misguided. I see the feature sets of vim/emacs and your common IDE as nearly disjoint sets, and I couldn't be happier to see the good parts of the two editors being joined with the power of the IDE.
- mmavnn 15y ago
  That's largely my thought. I love Vim, and it's occasionally frustrating when VsVim doesn't cover a corner case; but the functionality of VS with ReSharper means that for .net code I'll put up with it.
- sho_hn 15y ago
  KDE's Kate editor, and by extension its KDevelop IDE (as it embeds Kate's editor tech), also have fairly capable vim modes.
- dkarl 15y ago
  IDEs are terrible text editors. Text editors are terrible IDEs. I can't wait until people figure out how to graft good text editors and good IDEs together. One way to do that is to provide IDE functionality as an external service to the text editor. There's a Scala editing package for Emacs called Ensime that uses the Scala presentation compiler, a service that runs in the background. Every time Ensime is asked to colorize code, provide code completion, or jump to the definition of a symbol, it asks the presentation compiler, which gives it the right answers. No half-assed guessing; it actually runs the relevant compiler passes and provides correct information. Another way to do it might be to embed a real text editor (not just a crappy emulation mode) into an IDE somehow. I think that's what I would prefer. Emulation modes in IDEs will always be playing catch-up, and power users of a Emacs or vim shouldn't have to maintain a mental catalog of which features have been emulated and which haven't. I don't know how it would work, though, and I don't know of anyone working on it.
  - sho_hn 15y ago
paul-woolcock 15y ago
Putting the standard key bindings for vi is one thing, but without being able to customize it like vim, it's almost worthless to me. The custom bindings I have set are there to do common operations, and they become an integral part of my vim.
- mmavnn 15y ago
  It does actually support a limited .vimrc - depends a bit what types of custom bindings you want.
- bmj 15y ago
  Agreed, but if you are forced to use VS2010[1], it's nice to have the keybindings. [1] Yes, you can survive without the IDE if you are doing .NET development.
smhinsey 15y ago
It looks like a non-trivial portion of this is F#, so if you're interested in that, it might be worth poking around the github repo.
- tkellogg 15y ago
  Funny, I actually cloned this repo last night to contribute. I really want to contribute because it's so useful and @jaredpar seems to be doing a shit ton of work all by himself. But the whole F# part is going to be a hurdle.
  - jaredpar 15y ago
    Yeah F# is a bit of a hurdle for contributors. In retrospect if I'd known I'd stick with the project this long I probably would've chosen C#. https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/wiki/FAQ#wiki-language https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/wiki/FAQ#wiki-language
jta 15y ago
Anyone tried this and can give some insight in comparison with ViEmu from http://www.viemu.com/ http://www.viemu.com/ ?
- bmj 15y ago
  I use this daily in VS2010, and have used ViEmu in previous VS versions. Generally, I like it, but it can be a bit sluggish at times. The only plugin I have running is JSLint, so I suspect it's VSVim causing the problems (though it only generally bogs down when I leave VS2010 for a bit). The keybindings work as one would expect. As I mentioned in a different thread, I wish it could break out of the tabbed window convention of VS and use buffers. ViEmu did feel a bit faster (and was less prone to crashing).
  - jaredpar 15y ago
    What version are you using? Prior to 1.2 there was a nasty perf bug with :hlsearch that caused it to be sluggish with 1) very large files or 2) a good number of files opened. The bug is mostly fixed in 1.2 but there are still a couple of corner cases. Those are addressed in 1.3 which will be released sometime next week. A beta drop is available here https://github.com/downloads/jaredpar/VsVim/VsVim-1.2-Beta2.zip https://github.com/downloads/jaredpar/VsVim/VsVim-1.2-Beta2.... As for crashes I'd love to hear about any you found. Feel free to send me email (hacker news alias at microsoft.com) or post an issue on github. https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/issues https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/issues
- mikecaron 15y ago
  I can chime in as I just purchased ViEmu. It's really wonderful to have all the Vim bindings present in studio (and the rest of Office!). I haven't noticed any speed issues and I haven't noticed bugs (yet), but I've only been using now daily for two weeks and I haven't installed any plugins for it.
- llimllib 15y ago
  I haven't tried VsVim, but I can say that the guy who writes ViEmu is a really nice guy who is extremely responsive to suggestions.
scott_to_s 15y ago
My development work is a polyglot split across Linux, Mac and Windows/.NET projects. I also use both Vim and Vim keyboard bindings (in other editors) on Unix. Whilst I prefer *nix, when I have to use Visual Studio, I use the VsVim plugin, and it's a real pleasure to be able to seamlessly move between platforms and development environments, IDEs and text editors in this way. Not only do I love VsVim, but it significantly reduces the friction of using Visual Studio, and even adds some enjoyment to coding on that platform. VsVim is F# under the hood too (which shouldn't matter to the user, but it _is_ kinda cool). Thoroughly recommended!
Stasyan 15y ago
I use this plugin everyday. It's got some serious bugs that make my heart stop. The biggest one is Undo. Looks like the plugin keeps it's own list of modifications that were performed. So when sometimes I press "u" to undo the latest change - Visual Studio gets suspended for a minute or two, and all my changes that I did since I opened Visual Studio (could be a day or a week) are pretty much gone. The work around is to close the file without saving.
- diab0lic 15y ago
  Hopefully stuff like this will get fixed now that the project is accepting contributions from other developers. There was a point where his employment agreement prevented such from happening.
  - halter73 15y ago
    It's great to hear that VsVim is finally accepting contributions from outside of Microsoft. During my internship at Microsoft last summer, there was one day where the interns in STB got into groups of about 5 and presented on topics of strategic importance to Microsoft. My group presented on how Microsoft could better embrace open source, and during my part of the presentation I focused heavily on how many of Microsoft's "OSS" projects don't accept outside contributions. I used VsVim to showcase how Microsoft was doing open source wrong. It was a great example, because Jared Parsons seemed to be doing everything he could to be a good OSS citizen and reach out to those who typically use an OSS stack (by putting his project on github instead of codeplex for example), but he had to turn down contributors outside of Microsoft as a matter of policy. I also didn't suspect that Microsoft would be repurposing a Vim emulator plugin written in F# for any of its closed source projects, so it didn't make sense to stop outsiders from contributing out of fear of losing complete ownership of the codebase. Several high-level execs in STB including Satya Nadella were there, so I would like to believe that my presentation played some small part in Microsoft now allowing outside contributions to VsVim. A discussion of VsVim's contribution policy ate up a lot of the question and answer session after my group's presentation, so it was pretty clear that I wasn't the only there who thought it was messed up.
eddieplan9 15y ago
This is very off-topic, but I am turned off by the URL. Is Microsoft obsessed with UUID? First, they have you use UUID to reference COM components. And now in URL? Next you will see them ask their own employees to use UUID as email addresses.
jugglingnutcase 15y ago
If anyone is interested, i have a solarized color set fork for VsVim: https://github.com/jugglingnutcase/visualstudio-colors-solarized https://github.com/jugglingnutcase/visualstudio-colors-solar... i recently screwed up the breakpoints though... now they're pink.

130 points by mmavnn 15y ago

If there's anyone out there comfortable in both the way of vi and the way of Emacs, does this feel better than the Emacs emulation [1]? I'd love to be able to work with text more efficiently in Visual Studio, but the Emacs emulation feels only half way there. [1] http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/09dc58c4-6f47-413a-9176-742be7463f92 http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/09dc58c4-6f47-...

jugglingnutcase 15y ago
i used to use the emacs emulation and i agree with you, it only felt halfway. Also, Jared seems way more responsive than the emacs people. i filed a few bug reports and saw few status updates or general updates. After feeling frustrated with that and the half-baked feel i switched to Vim and found VsVim. i've been really happy and havent looked back.

jcfrei 15y ago

there was a similiar plugin for eclipse around, called eclim.

ch0wn 15y ago
Isn't Eclim the other way around? I thought it would include features from Eclipse in Vim rather than bringing key Vim keybindings to Eclipse. There are several plugins for the latter though, like Vrapper[0] or ViPlugin[1]. There were also attempts to integrate a whole native Vim instance into eclipse[2]. [0] http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/ http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/ [1] http://www.viplugin.com/viplugin/ http://www.viplugin.com/viplugin/ [2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/vimplugin/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/vimplugin/
- jcfrei 15y ago
  check their page; what I meant specifically was the ability to run vim inside of eclipse.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - spwmoni 15y ago
    "The primary goal of eclim is to bring Eclipse functionality to the Vim editor." Maybe you're talking about vimplugin, which eclim uses a fork of to embed gvim in eclipse?
drKarl 15y ago
And Vrapper

johnfn 15y ago

This seems to be a part of a nascent trend in IDEs. There's vrapper and eclim for eclipse, Vintage for Sublime Text, and now this as well. I've seen a lot of arguments about how people don't use IDEs because vim/emacs are better, and I always felt they were misguided. I see the feature sets of vim/emacs and your common IDE as nearly disjoint sets, and I couldn't be happier to see the good parts of the two editors being joined with the power of the IDE.

mmavnn 15y ago
That's largely my thought. I love Vim, and it's occasionally frustrating when VsVim doesn't cover a corner case; but the functionality of VS with ReSharper means that for .net code I'll put up with it.
sho_hn 15y ago
KDE's Kate editor, and by extension its KDevelop IDE (as it embeds Kate's editor tech), also have fairly capable vim modes.
dkarl 15y ago
IDEs are terrible text editors. Text editors are terrible IDEs. I can't wait until people figure out how to graft good text editors and good IDEs together. One way to do that is to provide IDE functionality as an external service to the text editor. There's a Scala editing package for Emacs called Ensime that uses the Scala presentation compiler, a service that runs in the background. Every time Ensime is asked to colorize code, provide code completion, or jump to the definition of a symbol, it asks the presentation compiler, which gives it the right answers. No half-assed guessing; it actually runs the relevant compiler passes and provides correct information. Another way to do it might be to embed a real text editor (not just a crappy emulation mode) into an IDE somehow. I think that's what I would prefer. Emulation modes in IDEs will always be playing catch-up, and power users of a Emacs or vim shouldn't have to maintain a mental catalog of which features have been emulated and which haven't. I don't know how it would work, though, and I don't know of anyone working on it.
- sho_hn 15y ago

paul-woolcock 15y ago

Putting the standard key bindings for vi is one thing, but without being able to customize it like vim, it's almost worthless to me. The custom bindings I have set are there to do common operations, and they become an integral part of my vim.

mmavnn 15y ago
It does actually support a limited .vimrc - depends a bit what types of custom bindings you want.
bmj 15y ago
Agreed, but if you are forced to use VS2010[1], it's nice to have the keybindings. [1] Yes, you can survive without the IDE if you are doing .NET development.

smhinsey 15y ago

It looks like a non-trivial portion of this is F#, so if you're interested in that, it might be worth poking around the github repo.

tkellogg 15y ago
Funny, I actually cloned this repo last night to contribute. I really want to contribute because it's so useful and @jaredpar seems to be doing a shit ton of work all by himself. But the whole F# part is going to be a hurdle.
- jaredpar 15y ago
  Yeah F# is a bit of a hurdle for contributors. In retrospect if I'd known I'd stick with the project this long I probably would've chosen C#. https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/wiki/FAQ#wiki-language https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/wiki/FAQ#wiki-language

jta 15y ago

Anyone tried this and can give some insight in comparison with ViEmu from http://www.viemu.com/ http://www.viemu.com/ ?

bmj 15y ago
I use this daily in VS2010, and have used ViEmu in previous VS versions. Generally, I like it, but it can be a bit sluggish at times. The only plugin I have running is JSLint, so I suspect it's VSVim causing the problems (though it only generally bogs down when I leave VS2010 for a bit). The keybindings work as one would expect. As I mentioned in a different thread, I wish it could break out of the tabbed window convention of VS and use buffers. ViEmu did feel a bit faster (and was less prone to crashing).
- jaredpar 15y ago
  What version are you using? Prior to 1.2 there was a nasty perf bug with :hlsearch that caused it to be sluggish with 1) very large files or 2) a good number of files opened. The bug is mostly fixed in 1.2 but there are still a couple of corner cases. Those are addressed in 1.3 which will be released sometime next week. A beta drop is available here https://github.com/downloads/jaredpar/VsVim/VsVim-1.2-Beta2.zip https://github.com/downloads/jaredpar/VsVim/VsVim-1.2-Beta2.... As for crashes I'd love to hear about any you found. Feel free to send me email (hacker news alias at microsoft.com) or post an issue on github. https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/issues https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/issues
mikecaron 15y ago
I can chime in as I just purchased ViEmu. It's really wonderful to have all the Vim bindings present in studio (and the rest of Office!). I haven't noticed any speed issues and I haven't noticed bugs (yet), but I've only been using now daily for two weeks and I haven't installed any plugins for it.
llimllib 15y ago
I haven't tried VsVim, but I can say that the guy who writes ViEmu is a really nice guy who is extremely responsive to suggestions.

scott_to_s 15y ago

My development work is a polyglot split across Linux, Mac and Windows/.NET projects. I also use both Vim and Vim keyboard bindings (in other editors) on Unix. Whilst I prefer *nix, when I have to use Visual Studio, I use the VsVim plugin, and it's a real pleasure to be able to seamlessly move between platforms and development environments, IDEs and text editors in this way. Not only do I love VsVim, but it significantly reduces the friction of using Visual Studio, and even adds some enjoyment to coding on that platform. VsVim is F# under the hood too (which shouldn't matter to the user, but it _is_ kinda cool). Thoroughly recommended!

Stasyan 15y ago

I use this plugin everyday. It's got some serious bugs that make my heart stop. The biggest one is Undo. Looks like the plugin keeps it's own list of modifications that were performed. So when sometimes I press "u" to undo the latest change - Visual Studio gets suspended for a minute or two, and all my changes that I did since I opened Visual Studio (could be a day or a week) are pretty much gone. The work around is to close the file without saving.

diab0lic 15y ago
Hopefully stuff like this will get fixed now that the project is accepting contributions from other developers. There was a point where his employment agreement prevented such from happening.
- halter73 15y ago
  It's great to hear that VsVim is finally accepting contributions from outside of Microsoft. During my internship at Microsoft last summer, there was one day where the interns in STB got into groups of about 5 and presented on topics of strategic importance to Microsoft. My group presented on how Microsoft could better embrace open source, and during my part of the presentation I focused heavily on how many of Microsoft's "OSS" projects don't accept outside contributions. I used VsVim to showcase how Microsoft was doing open source wrong. It was a great example, because Jared Parsons seemed to be doing everything he could to be a good OSS citizen and reach out to those who typically use an OSS stack (by putting his project on github instead of codeplex for example), but he had to turn down contributors outside of Microsoft as a matter of policy. I also didn't suspect that Microsoft would be repurposing a Vim emulator plugin written in F# for any of its closed source projects, so it didn't make sense to stop outsiders from contributing out of fear of losing complete ownership of the codebase. Several high-level execs in STB including Satya Nadella were there, so I would like to believe that my presentation played some small part in Microsoft now allowing outside contributions to VsVim. A discussion of VsVim's contribution policy ate up a lot of the question and answer session after my group's presentation, so it was pretty clear that I wasn't the only there who thought it was messed up.

eddieplan9 15y ago

This is very off-topic, but I am turned off by the URL. Is Microsoft obsessed with UUID? First, they have you use UUID to reference COM components. And now in URL? Next you will see them ask their own employees to use UUID as email addresses.

jugglingnutcase 15y ago

If anyone is interested, i have a solarized color set fork for VsVim: https://github.com/jugglingnutcase/visualstudio-colors-solarized https://github.com/jugglingnutcase/visualstudio-colors-solar... i recently screwed up the breakpoints though... now they're pink.