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When I first broke into web development, my editors of choice were Coda, Dreamweaver and Visual Studio (I wonder if I am dating myself here). I made a mid-caree

by cdata 12y ago

When I first broke into web development, my editors of choice were Coda, Dreamweaver and Visual Studio (I wonder if I am dating myself here). I made a mid-career move to (non-gui) Vim, mostly out of general interest. The ramp up to Vim coming from GUI-heavy editors was a long one, but I stuck with it and it was worth it for me. So, it's definitely possible to switch, you just have to be able to deal with that ramp up.

Retra 12y ago
I've been trying out vim for a while, hoping to get more productive, but the fact that "hjkl" is not "jkl;" -home keys- and that I have to reach all the way across the keyboard to hit [esc] every three seconds is not helping... I pretty much use sublime text for everything these days.
- TheCoreh 12y ago
  You can map Caps Lock to esc. A lot of people who use Vim do that.
- grmarcil 12y ago
  You can also remap Esc to jj by adding the following to your vimrc inoremap jj <Esc> The hjkl thing feels weird for a long time but it becomes natural after a while. I used Sublime for a long time with the Vintage plugin (vim like movements and some other vim features) before moving to Vim and that made the transition much easier for me. I still like Sublime, but Vim's full integration with the terminal environment is hard to beat.
- Dewie 12y ago
  > but the fact that "hjkl" is not "jkl;" -home keys- On American keyboards, anyway. That isn't how the keys are laid out on modern Dutch keyboards, though I don't know what they were like when Vim was created.
  - dunham 12y ago
    Vim inherited the keyboard mapping from vi. vi was designed on a QWERTY (American) keyboard, but the particular terminal that the author used had arrows printed on the hjkl keycaps. More information at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
- benrhughes 12y ago
  Out of the box, ctrl-[ is mapped to escape. It took me about a week to un-learn Esc, but it is one of the better vim decisions I've made (along with mapping j to gj and k to gk, and mapping tab to :bnext).

by cdata 12y ago

Retra 12y ago

I've been trying out vim for a while, hoping to get more productive, but the fact that "hjkl" is not "jkl;" -home keys- and that I have to reach all the way across the keyboard to hit [esc] every three seconds is not helping... I pretty much use sublime text for everything these days.

TheCoreh 12y ago
You can map Caps Lock to esc. A lot of people who use Vim do that.
grmarcil 12y ago
You can also remap Esc to jj by adding the following to your vimrc inoremap jj <Esc> The hjkl thing feels weird for a long time but it becomes natural after a while. I used Sublime for a long time with the Vintage plugin (vim like movements and some other vim features) before moving to Vim and that made the transition much easier for me. I still like Sublime, but Vim's full integration with the terminal environment is hard to beat.
Dewie 12y ago
> but the fact that "hjkl" is not "jkl;" -home keys- On American keyboards, anyway. That isn't how the keys are laid out on modern Dutch keyboards, though I don't know what they were like when Vim was created.
- dunham 12y ago
  Vim inherited the keyboard mapping from vi. vi was designed on a QWERTY (American) keyboard, but the particular terminal that the author used had arrows printed on the hjkl keycaps. More information at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
benrhughes 12y ago
Out of the box, ctrl-[ is mapped to escape. It took me about a week to un-learn Esc, but it is one of the better vim decisions I've made (along with mapping j to gj and k to gk, and mapping tab to :bnext).