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-- why vim. Don't want to create a flame thread, but I felt the urge to reply. I was really skeptical of vim as an editor just like you are, until I (and I am

by eLobato 14y ago

-- why vim. Don't want to create a flame thread, but I felt the urge to reply. I was really skeptical of vim as an editor just like you are, until I (and I am so glad I did) forced myself to use vim for a month for ALL my text editing. The linux kernel is old, does that make it less useful? That's not a valid argument at all. It certainly takes some time to learn how to do things, macros, search and replace, move blocks of text, install some good plugins, etc... All of this is incredibly fast and ergonomic as opposed to move your right hand to the arrow keys every now and then. Textmate, Gedit, Redcar, pretty much other text editor has just a subset of features that vim has (emacs being the exception where vim might be a subset of emacs). Learning vim is just like learning a sort of new way of talking to your editor. ":wq" is obvious once you learn the words. It means write and quit. Another big advantage I see is I can work remotely through SSH and be instantly super productive with an editor that doesn't get in my way. I learnt vim before doing this, now I pretty much do all my coding on remote machines where using Textmate would simply be losing a lot of time after a few days. It is not a replacement for IntelliJ Idea, Eclipse, Visual Studio, or any IDE. IDE's help you in a different way that sometimes can be more valuable than having a powerful tool to edit code. Programming JavaEE apps for instance is something I just find way easier to do with an IDE. I agree, the user has to put a lot of effort to be able to understand and make vim work for him as an amazing editor. Spending time learning how to use a computer program is something we are not used to do these days but in the case of vim it pays off. --- OP Back to the original topic, I agree opening the results on a web browser sort of defeats the point for me as well. If you can find a way to render the articles and comments texts nicely in a terminal I would find it a lot more useful though. Maybe you can reuse the parsing work the fellows at Pulse.me have done, I can't find the feed if there's any though :( . Best of luck!

udzinari 14y ago
> If you can find a way to render the articles and comments texts nicely in a terminal I would find it a lot more useful though I am completely with you on not wanting a flame thread, but: In emacs you can run ansi-term, and open links with w3m right in an emacs buffer. I use if for most of documentation reading all the time (invoke documentation lookup on symbol under point et. al.)
mmorett 14y ago
"It certainly takes some time to learn how to do things, macros, search and replace, move blocks of text, install some good plugins, etc... All of this is incredibly fast and ergonomic as opposed to move your right hand to the arrow keys every now and then. " This explains it so perfectly. The arrow keys are not a penalty. They are 1. clearly labeled, and 2. available on every keyboard. Using them is intuitive. They require no knowledge or memorization. Yes, I have to move my right hand to them, just as I have to occasionally move my right hand to the mouse and/or trackpad. I am not performing data entry. I am editing a file, often a configuration file of some sort. Speed is not the issue; accuracy of the changes being made are. Even when I'm coding in an IDE, I'm not touch-typing like a 1960s typist. I spend more time thinking/contemplating than typing. It's not a vi/vim thing. Emacs was just as confusing to me. I'm not proposing or suggesting anything so much as observing how a new, less effective technique of consuming HN was given praise "just because it's done in Terminal". There is a perverse hatred of the GUI or even things considered intuitive in the linux world, which I understand are inherited from the unix world, which is very, very old. I just don't understand why we can't pay homage to that legacy, but still advance the needle. What the developer did was nice, showed skill, deserves some props, but not useful. Making a character-based editor that could be used by grandma for the next 20 years in linux would be.

by eLobato 14y ago

udzinari 14y ago

> If you can find a way to render the articles and comments texts nicely in a terminal I would find it a lot more useful though I am completely with you on not wanting a flame thread, but: In emacs you can run ansi-term, and open links with w3m right in an emacs buffer. I use if for most of documentation reading all the time (invoke documentation lookup on symbol under point et. al.)

mmorett 14y ago

"It certainly takes some time to learn how to do things, macros, search and replace, move blocks of text, install some good plugins, etc... All of this is incredibly fast and ergonomic as opposed to move your right hand to the arrow keys every now and then. " This explains it so perfectly. The arrow keys are not a penalty. They are 1. clearly labeled, and 2. available on every keyboard. Using them is intuitive. They require no knowledge or memorization. Yes, I have to move my right hand to them, just as I have to occasionally move my right hand to the mouse and/or trackpad. I am not performing data entry. I am editing a file, often a configuration file of some sort. Speed is not the issue; accuracy of the changes being made are. Even when I'm coding in an IDE, I'm not touch-typing like a 1960s typist. I spend more time thinking/contemplating than typing. It's not a vi/vim thing. Emacs was just as confusing to me. I'm not proposing or suggesting anything so much as observing how a new, less effective technique of consuming HN was given praise "just because it's done in Terminal". There is a perverse hatred of the GUI or even things considered intuitive in the linux world, which I understand are inherited from the unix world, which is very, very old. I just don't understand why we can't pay homage to that legacy, but still advance the needle. What the developer did was nice, showed skill, deserves some props, but not useful. Making a character-based editor that could be used by grandma for the next 20 years in linux would be.