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I'm curious: Is it really worth it to learn vim for the productivity? I've used vim as far as simple search, visual mode, and copy/paste. One of the things I'v

by Osmose 17y ago

I'm curious: Is it really worth it to learn vim for the productivity? I've used vim as far as simple search, visual mode, and copy/paste. One of the things I've noticed when attempting to learn more vim is that when using other editors I use the time it takes to scroll or navigate to think about what I'm doing or what to work on next. From that (possibly naive) perspective, the effort to learn vim seems less necessary. Am I the only one who thinks this way? Note: I make an exception for regex search and replace as an amazing power feature, but the GUI editor I use most of the time can do that anyway (Notepad++). Also now I'm really interested by snippets after having looked them up.

gnosis 17y ago
If all you use an editor for is searching, copying, pasting, and typing simple documents, then a simpler editor than vim would probably suffice. But if you use an editor for programming or composing more complex documents (such as LaTeX articles/books), then learning vim could save you a lot of time. vim is also handy for editing lots of small, simple documents scattered all over a filesystem and on many different machines (tasks that system administrators have to do quite frequently). Take a look through vim.org's script repository for just a small inkling of what vim could do. http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?order_by=rating http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?order_b... This list of "best vim tips" should also give you a taste: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Best_Vim_Tips http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Best_Vim_Tips
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  i use vim because using the mouse hurts. this replaces the time required for moving my hands from kb to mouse and back with time spent noodling around in vimtutor and googling vim commands ;)
tetha 17y ago
Recent, massive productivity increases for me: - discovering errorformat and using error format and quickfix to solve the complains a style checking tool outputs. This turned 'look in file. unterstand filename and line number and remember the reason, enter long path, navigate to line, fix reason' to ':cn, read reason, fix reason, :w, goto 1', and (opposed to some IDE), I can still focus on getting things done first and then fixing style issues. - registers and macros. Recently, I had a number of similar fixes to do, even though it was not entirely trivial to describe those fixes with a regular expression. However, it was possible to describe the sequence of operations as a number of vim movements and vim operations. Thus, I could record the editing of a single file into a macro and just apply this macro to each file. This turned around 30-40 minutes of annoying things into like 5 minutes. - after case b, learning about arglists and argdo, which would have cut down the time required for the change to a few seconds, opposed to several minutes. Those are just from the top of my head.

by Osmose 17y ago

gnosis 17y ago

If all you use an editor for is searching, copying, pasting, and typing simple documents, then a simpler editor than vim would probably suffice. But if you use an editor for programming or composing more complex documents (such as LaTeX articles/books), then learning vim could save you a lot of time. vim is also handy for editing lots of small, simple documents scattered all over a filesystem and on many different machines (tasks that system administrators have to do quite frequently). Take a look through vim.org's script repository for just a small inkling of what vim could do. http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?order_by=rating http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?order_b... This list of "best vim tips" should also give you a taste: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Best_Vim_Tips http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Best_Vim_Tips

aaronblohowiak 17y ago
i use vim because using the mouse hurts. this replaces the time required for moving my hands from kb to mouse and back with time spent noodling around in vimtutor and googling vim commands ;)

tetha 17y ago

Recent, massive productivity increases for me: - discovering errorformat and using error format and quickfix to solve the complains a style checking tool outputs. This turned 'look in file. unterstand filename and line number and remember the reason, enter long path, navigate to line, fix reason' to ':cn, read reason, fix reason, :w, goto 1', and (opposed to some IDE), I can still focus on getting things done first and then fixing style issues. - registers and macros. Recently, I had a number of similar fixes to do, even though it was not entirely trivial to describe those fixes with a regular expression. However, it was possible to describe the sequence of operations as a number of vim movements and vim operations. Thus, I could record the editing of a single file into a macro and just apply this macro to each file. This turned around 30-40 minutes of annoying things into like 5 minutes. - after case b, learning about arglists and argdo, which would have cut down the time required for the change to a few seconds, opposed to several minutes. Those are just from the top of my head.