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Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

81 points by sankho 11y ago

test_userz_001 11y ago
seriously? no one gives a flying fuck you learned how to use a text editor that has been around since 1979. how the hell does this qualify as front page news?
- farresito 11y ago
  Well, ask the people that vote it :P
- sankho 11y ago
  I decided to start blogging again (first post) and I put it on hacker news, and other people upvoted it. So to be accurate, YOU don't give a flying fuck, anonymous account guy. But, thanks for your opinion and in the future hopefully I'll write something that you like as well.
  - engi_nerd 11y ago
    Your post is relevant and interesting. Don't let that person discourage you.
farresito 11y ago
vim overhyped as an editor? It might be overhyped as a programming tool (you won't write 2x the same amount of lines in a day; you will not be 5x more productive), but as an editor, it deserves every single bit of hype that it has. No other editor stands next to vim. A lot of people dislike editors. It's fine. There are a million tools out there that help people become more productive programmers. You might enjoy IntelliJ or you might not. You might like cscope or hate it. Tt doesn't matter. One needs to find the tools that helps him in their day to day job. But if you need an editor, vim is no doubt the single best out there.
- mateuszf 11y ago
  > No other editor stands next to vim And no other operating system stands next to emacs.
  - farresito 11y ago
    I knew someone would answer that. It was just a matter of time.
    - dkns 11y ago
      We need some sort of variation of Godwin's Law when it comes to text editors. Something like 'the probability of someone mentioning emacs as great operating system in any discussion about text editors = 1'.
- sankho 11y ago
  nonono read the rest I love the VIM! But... there's an abundance of internet quotes like "No other editor stands next to vim" (see parent comment), so I wanted to make sure the reader didn't think I was proselytizing.
- FreeFull 11y ago
  I've switched from vim to kakoune some time ago. vim does have the advantage of a bigger ecosystem, but I do believe it is possible to have an editor better than it.
  - farresito 11y ago
    I've taken a look at kakoune. It's very similar to vim, isn't it? When I say vim, I also mean neovim, which currently is already superior to vim in a lot of ways.
    - FreeFull 11y ago
      The author of kakoune initially intended to rewrite vim from scratch, so there is definitely a similarity. A big difference is that kakoune operates in terms of selections rather than motions, with built-in support for things like multiple cursors as well. I find it more intuitive to use than vim, and just as powerful.
imakesnowflakes 11y ago
One year? That is like "Takeaways from riding a Superbike in first gear, for one minute - Verdict. Super bikes are way overhyped!"
- Karunamon 11y ago
  So let's assume that, by using vim as the primary editor as a coder, the author used it roughly 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. That's 1,920 hours. I daresay it's impossible for someone to not use a tool, however complicated, for nearly 2000 hours and not become quite familiar with its operation. This is also 1/5th of the (disputed) "magic number" of 10,000 hours to master a skill.
  - segmondy 11y ago
    It's very possible to use a tool for a year or 10 and not be quite familiar with it's operation. You have to actively make the effort to learn new things to learn new things.
  - svckr 11y ago
    Well, I did manage to get through the first year or two (not 40hrs per week but close) with blissful ignorance of what vim was capable of. Only then did I start picking up new commands beyond the basic insert, append, delete stuff. And even much later did I really grasp vim's concept of text-objects. Of course, this was absolutely the wrong way to go. Would I have spent more time upfront learning, my productivity wouldn't have sucked as much. But then again, typing usually is not the bottleneck. What I'm trying to say is: Yes, you can very much get through a year or more of using vim without leveraging it's power. (And you probably will, given how much there is to learn.)
iLemming 11y ago
now you should try Spacemacs
- mnazim 11y ago
  +1 for Spacemacs. Former vim user, now using smacemacs for past few months. I found a number of things just work way better in emacs than in vim. For example, web-mode was a revelation for me. I could never get vim to get syntax right in mixed HTML-JS files. Ability to edit very large files with ease was another one in favour of emacs. Vim would freeze up for a seconds or two while saving even half a megabyte file. helm and family blew my mind away. Another win spacemacs is it does not hide default emacs functionality. All default emacs keyboard shortcuts would always work, so learning vanilla emacs is still helpful. Once I got to know spacemacs shortcut layout, it was surprisingly intutive. (YMMV)
- nilkn 11y ago
  I know this is going to sound silly, but I'd go so far as to say that Spacemacs is one of the best editors ever made. But it's not nearly as portable as vanilla vim. Even vim with several plugins, including vimproc and Unite, I've found is a lot more portable than Spacemacs. Spacemacs is a lot slower as well. For me, unfortunately portability is really important, which is why so far nothing has been able to sway me away from my trusty tmux + vim + Unite combination.
- pyre 11y ago
  I've tried Emacs + Evil and Spacemacs, but eventually just came back to Vim.
- falcolas 11y ago
  I've picked it up three times now, and every time the plugin combination I chose (nothing outside if what's included in Spacemacs, and using a fully supported install) would lock up the editor while using full CPU 3-4 times a day. The minor upgrade in functionality wasn't worth the instability.
viebel 11y ago
The great advantage of vim is that it forces you to use only the keyboard. No mouse at all! Mouse is slow. Keyboard is fast (once you get used to it).
- andresmanz 11y ago
  Exactly. Recently, I switched to i3[0] and Vimium[1] and it's just wonderful. Now I'm way faster than before and hardly ever use the mouse. [0] https://i3wm.org https://i3wm.org [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...
  - mixedmath 11y ago
    As a slight aside, how did you choose i3 over the other tiling window managers? I chose xmonad at one time, but it was more or less by chance --- someone else used it that I knew, and so I tried it. But I haven't actually compared any.
    - andresmanz 11y ago
      I've read the name a few times and people seemed to be happy with it, so I gave it a try. I liked it immediately, not least because of the simple but powerful customization. To be honest, I haven't tried any other TWMs yet, but I will soon.
      - klibertp 11y ago
        Depending on your background you may be pleased to see StumpWM (https://stumpwm.github.io/ https://stumpwm.github.io/). It's a tiling window manager, as minimal as ratpoison in interface but fully configurable and hackable on runtime, to the point of rebuilding parts of the system as it's running. It's the best WM experience I had since the old Enlightenment and I'm now using it full time. I even wrote some posts about it: https://klibert.pl/#stumpwm-better-modeline https://klibert.pl/#stumpwm-better-modeline https://klibert.pl/#stumpwm https://klibert.pl/#stumpwm Ah, forgot to mention: it's in Common Lisp, so YMMV by a lot :)
JD557 11y ago
> Relax! No other text editor has as many developers working on plugins than VIM. What about emacs?
- mixedmath 11y ago
  I thought this too when I read the article. Then it occurred to me that I don't have any idea how many developers work on plugins for either. Looking naively at github files by type is unreliable, since so many people do things like keep their .vimrc and .vim files on github which artificially inflates the number of .vimL repositories. What I do know is that if there's something I want done, I suspect there is a plugin that does it. So at least morally, there are sufficiently developers for both emacs and vim (in my experience).
  - JD557 11y ago
    > What I do know is that if there's something I want done, I suspect there is a plugin that does it. Maybe it's just my anecdotal evidence, but I've looked for alternatives to certain emacs plugins used by my co-workers (such as org-mode and ensime) and couldn't find a suitable replacement (I know there are some alternatives for vim, but they pale in comparison to their emacs counterparts).
- omginternets 11y ago
  We're talking about text editors, not operating systems. (Sorry. I had to. Don't hate me!)
  - arca_vorago 11y ago
    I know it's the old cliche, but I love emacs largely for that reason. When I'm ssh'ed into one of my boxen, I can do a simple scp and have all my configs for IRC, eww, org-mode, EmacsWget, my custom scripts, etc, everything in one place and managed under one system ecosystem, and from a terminal without having to touch/forward X. The longer I spend in it the less convoluted simple text editing becomes, I just think there is a high barrier to entry that is daunting even for command line jockeys. I still vi/vim everyday too though, mostly because some things, like embedded stuff I work on, emacs would be too much, so it's very much situational.
DarkTree 11y ago
The thing about Vim is that I cannot imagine creating it and thinking, "This will be much faster and easier than a mouse eventually". But, I also wouldn't think that I could learn how to type fast without looking at the keys if I just stumbled across a keyboard, but both are undoubtedly true. Like anything physical, it requires practice and muscle memory. Would you rather go back to looking at every single key to type? That's how vim users feel about regular text editors. Try it out.
- ethanbond 11y ago
  Doesn't vim (or similar schemas) predate the mouse?
  - farresito 11y ago
    Yes, it does. Well, actually vi, which is its predecessor.
  - DarkTree 11y ago
    yes it does, but I was just making an example from my viewpoint.
- leephillips 11y ago
  Absolutely - and you can say the same thing about a piano. A flexible, open-ended interface, combined with learning and practice, will vastly outperform any attempt to replace effort by an "intuitive" set of controls.
mixedmath 11y ago
For what it's worth, the author (sankho) mentions that he uses other editors for project-wide find and replace. This can be done in vim too (although I do not --- I'll return to this). You can check out the typically great vimcasts post on this: http://vimcasts.org/episodes/project-wide-find-and-replace/ http://vimcasts.org/episodes/project-wide-find-and-replace/ For whatever reason, I find it easier to use commandline tools to do large search and replaces. I do embrace the vim-as-text-editor within the larger Linux-program-composability philosophy, but I understand that not everyone else does. So I use ack and perl, as mentioned in this StackOverflow post: http://stackoverflow.com/a/8744108/1141805 http://stackoverflow.com/a/8744108/1141805 (Actually, sometimes I distinctly do things the wrong way. I open a scratch buffer, `:r! ls` to get my file names, restrict to those that I want, create a macro that does what I want on the file under the cursor, and then repeat the macro. I am not proud.)
- tomphoolery 11y ago
  Here's my find-and-replace command, copied from some StackOverflow answer at some point in time: https://github.com/tubbo/home/blob/master/bin/repl https://github.com/tubbo/home/blob/master/bin/repl It uses Ag to search over each file and Perl to perform the necessary regex. It also creates *.bak backup files in case I replaced something that wasn't supposed to be replaced, but will remove those backup files if I'm in a Git repo (because I basically had to `git clean -f` every time after using this command...so I just wrote it into the command)
- olalonde 11y ago
  It's possible to run a macro on a list of files? I usually just open the files one by one and @@:wq (oops)
  - rav 11y ago
    Yes, it's quite possible: :args *.cpp " or any other list of files :set autowrite :argdo normal @@ :wq
ixtli 11y ago
I agree with everything here except the idea that you shouldn't start with MacVIM. The main issue with new users getting into modal editors is the learning curve. If you can reduce the upfront difficulty by accepting OS-specific hotkeys and mouse events, why not? Using VIM saves you time and a smart user will search out the ways the editor can help her, but there's no value in making the user go cold turkey.
- tthayer 11y ago
  The main problem I have with suggesting starting with MacVim is that using it doesn't translate well when you're SSH'd into another system running a different OS. I've been using Vim for a while (and now neovim) and recently tried out MacVim and it just didn't make any sense to me. The menus are totally non-intuitive if you're used to doing everything from the keyboard. Conversely, I wouldn't expect someone who started by using MacVim to be comfortable with the keyboard shortcuts either. Opening up a virgin vim session on a new system kind of makes you realize how much you'll miss out on if you don't know about :set number, :set wrap, :set syntax <whatever>.
  - pyre 11y ago
    > The menus are totally non-intuitive if you're used to doing everything from the keyboard You can disable the menus, and using MacVim doesn't require you to use the menus. I use Vim 100% with the keyboard, and I still use MacVim.
chousuke 11y ago
I don't actually program all that much, but I find that for text editing, vim (or even vi) is hard to beat. As a sysadmin, I appreciate the fact that some form of vi exists on any vaguely unix-like machine I log into. Even without a .vimrc, the basic commands for line editing and searching work and they match with tools like less (or does less match vi?) and using vi has become second nature over time because it's everywhere and it tends to be the default (I hate it when someone makes nano the default $EDITOR so that eg. sudoedit doesn't do the right thing) I wish Windows servers shipped with vi, too. A decent text editor is the one thing I consistently find myself missing. Notepad most definitely does not count.
tachion 11y ago
I've tried switching to VIM (from few years of using Sublime) few times already, but failed every single time: bare VIM is too dysfunctional to my taste and ways of working with text editor (missing tabs, file/folder treee view, easy switching documents, easy visual copy/paste and so on, missing code expanding/completion...). Last time I tried spf-vim[0] but while it looked 'cool' (it has colors, it does code completion, it somwhere have the folder/file tree view and maybe eve tabs/panels...) yet it is overly complicated, quite badly documented (there is no intro like tutorial on getting you up to speed with what you may want from a text editor, just some strange sounding plugin list with few shortcuts here and there) and overloaded with plugins I am not interested in (PHP related ones) not to mention having few strange issues requiring googling and writing additional configuration just to make VIM behave... So, while I'd love to use VIM for its speed, the fact its easily portable with the configuration and is available on almost every OS (BSD, Mac, Windows, Linux, you name it) I still write 99% of my code in Sublime, and only use VIM on servers to change this and that. Perhaps another time ;) [0] http://vim.spf13.com/ http://vim.spf13.com/
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  Some thoughts: What you call tabs are what vim calls buffers. (EDIT vim has something called tabs as well but they do something else.) Completion press e.g. control-x (although I actually use a plugin here so I don't know how good vim's built in is). Visual selection add set mouse=a to the .vimrc Or using the "v" command
  - base698 11y ago
    What he calls tabs are actually tabs: :tabe create tab :tabn next tab, :tabp previous tab, :tabm move tab. I have tabn/tabp bound to <leader>l and <leader>h for easy nav and <leader>t for create.
    - ecnahc515 11y ago
      Tabs in vim are actually just views of buffers. Ie: a workspace more than an editing window. Buffers are the proper solution to the mentioned comment.
gernerz 11y ago
SublimeText has a vim mode called "vintage" that allows vim commands to work.
- pacomerh 11y ago
  Yeah, and its not as good. Try VIM's block selection in sublime, it doesn't exist. Also, the whole point is getting your hands off the mouse, and sublime still needs it.
chrisguilbeau 11y ago
If anyone is looking for a good book on using vim effectively, this one is great: https://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim https://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim
towb 11y ago
The key to learning vim for me was to create my own vimrc from the ground up. I decided to not add anything to that file that I didn't understand what it was for. That and time. As long as you can open a file in vim, add a couple of lines of code and save it, you're good to go. Just keep using it and that vim magic will come to you ;)
kev6168 11y ago
There is another element in using Vim that's not mentioned -- it's a super fun journey, full of surprising discoveries, handsome rewards for a little effort, and generally the happy experience in continuous getting nice things from a seemingly inexhaustible source. As an example, having used Vim for ten years, just within the last few weeks I started to seriously learn and use Ultisnips, SkyBison, Vim-swoop, etc. It has been pure fun and rewarding. To be clear, I don't use that many plugins. Often time I discover something already built into Vim proper which can replace a plugin (after some light scripting/configurations), then I usually uninstall that plugin. This has happened more frequently in recent years, possibly because of my improved Vim-fu (still a mediocre user I am sure). So both productivity and portability get improved while I am having fun learning new things.
jastanton 11y ago
Does anyone know if Vim has the power of multi line editing / multiple cursors like w/ Sublime Text? The large majority of my productivity involved copying and pasting with multi line select, and jumping words and different boundaries on multiple lines at once. Anything that matches ST for Vim?
- FreeFull 11y ago
  An another alternative to the vim plugins, here's a vim-like text editor that concentrates on selections and multiple cursors: https://github.com/mawww/kakoune https://github.com/mawww/kakoune
- _murphys_law_ 11y ago
  I think there does exist a way to enter a visual block mode, but i is kind of a pain. You might try looking around for some third party modules. Here is one I found by doing a github search: https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors
- Yzupnick 11y ago
  There is a plugin for that: https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors But I find that I can usually accomplish the same thing with macro or a targeted search and replace.
- tcoff91 11y ago
  Vim does have the ability to insert text on multiple lines. in visual block mode (CTRL-V or CTRL-Q), select a column of lines you would like to edit. Then, you can enter insert mode or paste and it will do the same thing on all the lines selected. so to edit 4 lines at once it would be (CTRL-Q)3jI and then type in whatever i want and when I exit back to normal mode the text will appear on all 4 lines.
amelius 11y ago
Any tips on learning the internal configuration/control language? I've been using vim for quit some time now (I like it a lot), but never have been able to grok anything about it besides entering code :)
overgard 11y ago
Here's the thing: when you're coding, how much time is spent on reading vs writing? For me it's probably 90/10. Since most my time is spent concentrating on understanding code, the last thing I want is an editor that forces me to consciously think about text operations. "d[downkey]4" might be theoretically more efficient, but I spend way less cognitive energy holding down the shift key and pressing the down arrow 4 times. The other thing is efficient navigation within one file isn't super useful to me. I spend most my time doing find-in-files or jump-to-definition or rename-across-this-project. Vim kind of sucks for all those use cases. There are plugins of course, but that just brings it up to par with popular IDE's, except with a clunkier interface. I say this as a person that knows vim well. If I'm SSH'd into a server and I need to edit a config file, vim is the first thing I'll reach for, but for coding, I'm pretty much only using it if I'm using a language that doesn't have a nice IDE already.
- savanaly 11y ago
  >Since most my time is spent concentrating on understanding code, the last thing I want is an editor that forces me to consciously think about text operations. "d[downkey]4" might be theoretically more efficient, but I spend way less cognitive energy holding down the shift key and pressing the down arrow 4 times. The point is well taken, but don't forget that for most people that downside of increased cognitive pressure goes away after a few days or weeks of regular vim usage. I've been using it for about a year and all the combos I normally use are second nature to me (and have been for months). Don't underestimate the human brain's ability to grow and adapt and for incredibly complicated things to quickly turn into routine. For the record, I almost never use vim's much touted hit a number key then an action to do it n times feature. I have modified it so j and k do the normal down/up one line and J K go down/up seven lines or so for scrolling. [1] If I'm doing something like deleting a line and have to delete a bunch (common case), then I'll "dd" to delete line and then hit "." (which repeats the last action) three or four times until satisfied. Way easier than counting the number of lines to delete then typing "4dd" imo. [1] Note for anyone who wants to duplicate this: it was still unbearably slow to just hold down J or K to scroll because the default delay between depressing a key and when OSX decides you are actually holding it down and not just pressing it once is too long. Decrease it in the native settings of your OS for a smoother experience.
tygorius 11y ago
No other text editor has as many developers working on plugins than VIM. Virtually anything that exists in another text editor which isn’t mouse driven has some very popular, very supported, very documented plugin you can use. And the Vim equivalent of org mode is what again? I'm a Steve Litt fan, but Vim Outliner isn't even in the same league as org mode. As a Vim user of many years I still believe it to be superior to emacs when it comes to editing text. That said, emacs is a vastly superior programming environment. And like many people I find org mode to be indispensible. Happily, these things aren't either/or situations. I still use Vim for quick text editing tasks, but for other matters evil+org mode lets me have the best of both worlds. Edit: typos
- falcolas 11y ago
  > And the Vim equivalent of org mode is what again? VimWiki: https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki Not 100% of the same functionality, but close enough for me as to not matter. For the missing features, I have the rest of the OS.
homulilly 11y ago
I use vim on a daily basis and think it's a great editor, but it's definitely overhyped. Plugins in particularly are pretty disappointing if you're coming from an editor like sublime. Off the top of my head, syntax checking, fuzzy searching and multicursor options are all perfectly usable but very limited compared to sublime's offerings.
lewisl9029 11y ago
Eventually, I'm hoping for some keyboard/mouse hybrid like this to catch on: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1666150716/keymousetm-the-keyboard-and-mouse-re-invented/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1666150716/keymousetm-t... I didn't end up backing it though because I didn't want to dump $250 on a v1 product would likely have many issues to sort out. That and the ergonomics of the typing didn't look that great.
- anotherevan 11y ago
  Personally, I think this one looks better: http://www.combimouse.com/ http://www.combimouse.com/

81 points by sankho 11y ago

seriously? no one gives a flying fuck you learned how to use a text editor that has been around since 1979. how the hell does this qualify as front page news?

farresito 11y ago
Well, ask the people that vote it :P
sankho 11y ago
I decided to start blogging again (first post) and I put it on hacker news, and other people upvoted it. So to be accurate, YOU don't give a flying fuck, anonymous account guy. But, thanks for your opinion and in the future hopefully I'll write something that you like as well.
- engi_nerd 11y ago
  Your post is relevant and interesting. Don't let that person discourage you.

farresito 11y ago

vim overhyped as an editor? It might be overhyped as a programming tool (you won't write 2x the same amount of lines in a day; you will not be 5x more productive), but as an editor, it deserves every single bit of hype that it has. No other editor stands next to vim. A lot of people dislike editors. It's fine. There are a million tools out there that help people become more productive programmers. You might enjoy IntelliJ or you might not. You might like cscope or hate it. Tt doesn't matter. One needs to find the tools that helps him in their day to day job. But if you need an editor, vim is no doubt the single best out there.

mateuszf 11y ago
> No other editor stands next to vim And no other operating system stands next to emacs.
- farresito 11y ago
  I knew someone would answer that. It was just a matter of time.
  - dkns 11y ago
    We need some sort of variation of Godwin's Law when it comes to text editors. Something like 'the probability of someone mentioning emacs as great operating system in any discussion about text editors = 1'.
sankho 11y ago
nonono read the rest I love the VIM! But... there's an abundance of internet quotes like "No other editor stands next to vim" (see parent comment), so I wanted to make sure the reader didn't think I was proselytizing.
FreeFull 11y ago
I've switched from vim to kakoune some time ago. vim does have the advantage of a bigger ecosystem, but I do believe it is possible to have an editor better than it.
- farresito 11y ago
  I've taken a look at kakoune. It's very similar to vim, isn't it? When I say vim, I also mean neovim, which currently is already superior to vim in a lot of ways.
  - FreeFull 11y ago
    The author of kakoune initially intended to rewrite vim from scratch, so there is definitely a similarity. A big difference is that kakoune operates in terms of selections rather than motions, with built-in support for things like multiple cursors as well. I find it more intuitive to use than vim, and just as powerful.

imakesnowflakes 11y ago

One year? That is like "Takeaways from riding a Superbike in first gear, for one minute - Verdict. Super bikes are way overhyped!"

Karunamon 11y ago
So let's assume that, by using vim as the primary editor as a coder, the author used it roughly 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. That's 1,920 hours. I daresay it's impossible for someone to not use a tool, however complicated, for nearly 2000 hours and not become quite familiar with its operation. This is also 1/5th of the (disputed) "magic number" of 10,000 hours to master a skill.
- segmondy 11y ago
  It's very possible to use a tool for a year or 10 and not be quite familiar with it's operation. You have to actively make the effort to learn new things to learn new things.
- svckr 11y ago
  Well, I did manage to get through the first year or two (not 40hrs per week but close) with blissful ignorance of what vim was capable of. Only then did I start picking up new commands beyond the basic insert, append, delete stuff. And even much later did I really grasp vim's concept of text-objects. Of course, this was absolutely the wrong way to go. Would I have spent more time upfront learning, my productivity wouldn't have sucked as much. But then again, typing usually is not the bottleneck. What I'm trying to say is: Yes, you can very much get through a year or more of using vim without leveraging it's power. (And you probably will, given how much there is to learn.)

iLemming 11y ago

now you should try Spacemacs

mnazim 11y ago
+1 for Spacemacs. Former vim user, now using smacemacs for past few months. I found a number of things just work way better in emacs than in vim. For example, web-mode was a revelation for me. I could never get vim to get syntax right in mixed HTML-JS files. Ability to edit very large files with ease was another one in favour of emacs. Vim would freeze up for a seconds or two while saving even half a megabyte file. helm and family blew my mind away. Another win spacemacs is it does not hide default emacs functionality. All default emacs keyboard shortcuts would always work, so learning vanilla emacs is still helpful. Once I got to know spacemacs shortcut layout, it was surprisingly intutive. (YMMV)
nilkn 11y ago
I know this is going to sound silly, but I'd go so far as to say that Spacemacs is one of the best editors ever made. But it's not nearly as portable as vanilla vim. Even vim with several plugins, including vimproc and Unite, I've found is a lot more portable than Spacemacs. Spacemacs is a lot slower as well. For me, unfortunately portability is really important, which is why so far nothing has been able to sway me away from my trusty tmux + vim + Unite combination.
pyre 11y ago
I've tried Emacs + Evil and Spacemacs, but eventually just came back to Vim.
falcolas 11y ago
I've picked it up three times now, and every time the plugin combination I chose (nothing outside if what's included in Spacemacs, and using a fully supported install) would lock up the editor while using full CPU 3-4 times a day. The minor upgrade in functionality wasn't worth the instability.

viebel 11y ago

The great advantage of vim is that it forces you to use only the keyboard. No mouse at all! Mouse is slow. Keyboard is fast (once you get used to it).

andresmanz 11y ago
Exactly. Recently, I switched to i3[0] and Vimium[1] and it's just wonderful. Now I'm way faster than before and hardly ever use the mouse. [0] https://i3wm.org https://i3wm.org [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...
- mixedmath 11y ago
  As a slight aside, how did you choose i3 over the other tiling window managers? I chose xmonad at one time, but it was more or less by chance --- someone else used it that I knew, and so I tried it. But I haven't actually compared any.
  - andresmanz 11y ago
    I've read the name a few times and people seemed to be happy with it, so I gave it a try. I liked it immediately, not least because of the simple but powerful customization. To be honest, I haven't tried any other TWMs yet, but I will soon.
    - klibertp 11y ago
      Depending on your background you may be pleased to see StumpWM (https://stumpwm.github.io/ https://stumpwm.github.io/). It's a tiling window manager, as minimal as ratpoison in interface but fully configurable and hackable on runtime, to the point of rebuilding parts of the system as it's running. It's the best WM experience I had since the old Enlightenment and I'm now using it full time. I even wrote some posts about it: https://klibert.pl/#stumpwm-better-modeline https://klibert.pl/#stumpwm-better-modeline https://klibert.pl/#stumpwm https://klibert.pl/#stumpwm Ah, forgot to mention: it's in Common Lisp, so YMMV by a lot :)

JD557 11y ago

> Relax! No other text editor has as many developers working on plugins than VIM. What about emacs?

mixedmath 11y ago
I thought this too when I read the article. Then it occurred to me that I don't have any idea how many developers work on plugins for either. Looking naively at github files by type is unreliable, since so many people do things like keep their .vimrc and .vim files on github which artificially inflates the number of .vimL repositories. What I do know is that if there's something I want done, I suspect there is a plugin that does it. So at least morally, there are sufficiently developers for both emacs and vim (in my experience).
- JD557 11y ago
  > What I do know is that if there's something I want done, I suspect there is a plugin that does it. Maybe it's just my anecdotal evidence, but I've looked for alternatives to certain emacs plugins used by my co-workers (such as org-mode and ensime) and couldn't find a suitable replacement (I know there are some alternatives for vim, but they pale in comparison to their emacs counterparts).
omginternets 11y ago
We're talking about text editors, not operating systems. (Sorry. I had to. Don't hate me!)
- arca_vorago 11y ago
  I know it's the old cliche, but I love emacs largely for that reason. When I'm ssh'ed into one of my boxen, I can do a simple scp and have all my configs for IRC, eww, org-mode, EmacsWget, my custom scripts, etc, everything in one place and managed under one system ecosystem, and from a terminal without having to touch/forward X. The longer I spend in it the less convoluted simple text editing becomes, I just think there is a high barrier to entry that is daunting even for command line jockeys. I still vi/vim everyday too though, mostly because some things, like embedded stuff I work on, emacs would be too much, so it's very much situational.

DarkTree 11y ago

The thing about Vim is that I cannot imagine creating it and thinking, "This will be much faster and easier than a mouse eventually". But, I also wouldn't think that I could learn how to type fast without looking at the keys if I just stumbled across a keyboard, but both are undoubtedly true. Like anything physical, it requires practice and muscle memory. Would you rather go back to looking at every single key to type? That's how vim users feel about regular text editors. Try it out.

ethanbond 11y ago
Doesn't vim (or similar schemas) predate the mouse?
- farresito 11y ago
  Yes, it does. Well, actually vi, which is its predecessor.
- DarkTree 11y ago
  yes it does, but I was just making an example from my viewpoint.
leephillips 11y ago
Absolutely - and you can say the same thing about a piano. A flexible, open-ended interface, combined with learning and practice, will vastly outperform any attempt to replace effort by an "intuitive" set of controls.

mixedmath 11y ago

For what it's worth, the author (sankho) mentions that he uses other editors for project-wide find and replace. This can be done in vim too (although I do not --- I'll return to this). You can check out the typically great vimcasts post on this: http://vimcasts.org/episodes/project-wide-find-and-replace/ http://vimcasts.org/episodes/project-wide-find-and-replace/ For whatever reason, I find it easier to use commandline tools to do large search and replaces. I do embrace the vim-as-text-editor within the larger Linux-program-composability philosophy, but I understand that not everyone else does. So I use ack and perl, as mentioned in this StackOverflow post: http://stackoverflow.com/a/8744108/1141805 http://stackoverflow.com/a/8744108/1141805 (Actually, sometimes I distinctly do things the wrong way. I open a scratch buffer, `:r! ls` to get my file names, restrict to those that I want, create a macro that does what I want on the file under the cursor, and then repeat the macro. I am not proud.)

tomphoolery 11y ago
Here's my find-and-replace command, copied from some StackOverflow answer at some point in time: https://github.com/tubbo/home/blob/master/bin/repl https://github.com/tubbo/home/blob/master/bin/repl It uses Ag to search over each file and Perl to perform the necessary regex. It also creates *.bak backup files in case I replaced something that wasn't supposed to be replaced, but will remove those backup files if I'm in a Git repo (because I basically had to `git clean -f` every time after using this command...so I just wrote it into the command)
olalonde 11y ago
It's possible to run a macro on a list of files? I usually just open the files one by one and @@:wq (oops)
- rav 11y ago
  Yes, it's quite possible: :args *.cpp " or any other list of files :set autowrite :argdo normal @@ :wq

ixtli 11y ago

I agree with everything here except the idea that you shouldn't start with MacVIM. The main issue with new users getting into modal editors is the learning curve. If you can reduce the upfront difficulty by accepting OS-specific hotkeys and mouse events, why not? Using VIM saves you time and a smart user will search out the ways the editor can help her, but there's no value in making the user go cold turkey.

tthayer 11y ago
The main problem I have with suggesting starting with MacVim is that using it doesn't translate well when you're SSH'd into another system running a different OS. I've been using Vim for a while (and now neovim) and recently tried out MacVim and it just didn't make any sense to me. The menus are totally non-intuitive if you're used to doing everything from the keyboard. Conversely, I wouldn't expect someone who started by using MacVim to be comfortable with the keyboard shortcuts either. Opening up a virgin vim session on a new system kind of makes you realize how much you'll miss out on if you don't know about :set number, :set wrap, :set syntax <whatever>.
- pyre 11y ago
  > The menus are totally non-intuitive if you're used to doing everything from the keyboard You can disable the menus, and using MacVim doesn't require you to use the menus. I use Vim 100% with the keyboard, and I still use MacVim.

chousuke 11y ago

I don't actually program all that much, but I find that for text editing, vim (or even vi) is hard to beat. As a sysadmin, I appreciate the fact that some form of vi exists on any vaguely unix-like machine I log into. Even without a .vimrc, the basic commands for line editing and searching work and they match with tools like less (or does less match vi?) and using vi has become second nature over time because it's everywhere and it tends to be the default (I hate it when someone makes nano the default $EDITOR so that eg. sudoedit doesn't do the right thing) I wish Windows servers shipped with vi, too. A decent text editor is the one thing I consistently find myself missing. Notepad most definitely does not count.

tachion 11y ago

I've tried switching to VIM (from few years of using Sublime) few times already, but failed every single time: bare VIM is too dysfunctional to my taste and ways of working with text editor (missing tabs, file/folder treee view, easy switching documents, easy visual copy/paste and so on, missing code expanding/completion...). Last time I tried spf-vim[0] but while it looked 'cool' (it has colors, it does code completion, it somwhere have the folder/file tree view and maybe eve tabs/panels...) yet it is overly complicated, quite badly documented (there is no intro like tutorial on getting you up to speed with what you may want from a text editor, just some strange sounding plugin list with few shortcuts here and there) and overloaded with plugins I am not interested in (PHP related ones) not to mention having few strange issues requiring googling and writing additional configuration just to make VIM behave... So, while I'd love to use VIM for its speed, the fact its easily portable with the configuration and is available on almost every OS (BSD, Mac, Windows, Linux, you name it) I still write 99% of my code in Sublime, and only use VIM on servers to change this and that. Perhaps another time ;) [0] http://vim.spf13.com/ http://vim.spf13.com/

JupiterMoon 11y ago
Some thoughts: What you call tabs are what vim calls buffers. (EDIT vim has something called tabs as well but they do something else.) Completion press e.g. control-x (although I actually use a plugin here so I don't know how good vim's built in is). Visual selection add set mouse=a to the .vimrc Or using the "v" command
- base698 11y ago
  What he calls tabs are actually tabs: :tabe create tab :tabn next tab, :tabp previous tab, :tabm move tab. I have tabn/tabp bound to <leader>l and <leader>h for easy nav and <leader>t for create.
  - ecnahc515 11y ago
    Tabs in vim are actually just views of buffers. Ie: a workspace more than an editing window. Buffers are the proper solution to the mentioned comment.

gernerz 11y ago

SublimeText has a vim mode called "vintage" that allows vim commands to work.

pacomerh 11y ago
Yeah, and its not as good. Try VIM's block selection in sublime, it doesn't exist. Also, the whole point is getting your hands off the mouse, and sublime still needs it.

chrisguilbeau 11y ago

If anyone is looking for a good book on using vim effectively, this one is great: https://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim https://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim

towb 11y ago

The key to learning vim for me was to create my own vimrc from the ground up. I decided to not add anything to that file that I didn't understand what it was for. That and time. As long as you can open a file in vim, add a couple of lines of code and save it, you're good to go. Just keep using it and that vim magic will come to you ;)

kev6168 11y ago

There is another element in using Vim that's not mentioned -- it's a super fun journey, full of surprising discoveries, handsome rewards for a little effort, and generally the happy experience in continuous getting nice things from a seemingly inexhaustible source. As an example, having used Vim for ten years, just within the last few weeks I started to seriously learn and use Ultisnips, SkyBison, Vim-swoop, etc. It has been pure fun and rewarding. To be clear, I don't use that many plugins. Often time I discover something already built into Vim proper which can replace a plugin (after some light scripting/configurations), then I usually uninstall that plugin. This has happened more frequently in recent years, possibly because of my improved Vim-fu (still a mediocre user I am sure). So both productivity and portability get improved while I am having fun learning new things.

jastanton 11y ago

Does anyone know if Vim has the power of multi line editing / multiple cursors like w/ Sublime Text? The large majority of my productivity involved copying and pasting with multi line select, and jumping words and different boundaries on multiple lines at once. Anything that matches ST for Vim?

FreeFull 11y ago
An another alternative to the vim plugins, here's a vim-like text editor that concentrates on selections and multiple cursors: https://github.com/mawww/kakoune https://github.com/mawww/kakoune
_murphys_law_ 11y ago
I think there does exist a way to enter a visual block mode, but i is kind of a pain. You might try looking around for some third party modules. Here is one I found by doing a github search: https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors
Yzupnick 11y ago
There is a plugin for that: https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors But I find that I can usually accomplish the same thing with macro or a targeted search and replace.
tcoff91 11y ago
Vim does have the ability to insert text on multiple lines. in visual block mode (CTRL-V or CTRL-Q), select a column of lines you would like to edit. Then, you can enter insert mode or paste and it will do the same thing on all the lines selected. so to edit 4 lines at once it would be (CTRL-Q)3jI and then type in whatever i want and when I exit back to normal mode the text will appear on all 4 lines.

amelius 11y ago

Any tips on learning the internal configuration/control language? I've been using vim for quit some time now (I like it a lot), but never have been able to grok anything about it besides entering code :)

overgard 11y ago

Here's the thing: when you're coding, how much time is spent on reading vs writing? For me it's probably 90/10. Since most my time is spent concentrating on understanding code, the last thing I want is an editor that forces me to consciously think about text operations. "d[downkey]4" might be theoretically more efficient, but I spend way less cognitive energy holding down the shift key and pressing the down arrow 4 times. The other thing is efficient navigation within one file isn't super useful to me. I spend most my time doing find-in-files or jump-to-definition or rename-across-this-project. Vim kind of sucks for all those use cases. There are plugins of course, but that just brings it up to par with popular IDE's, except with a clunkier interface. I say this as a person that knows vim well. If I'm SSH'd into a server and I need to edit a config file, vim is the first thing I'll reach for, but for coding, I'm pretty much only using it if I'm using a language that doesn't have a nice IDE already.

savanaly 11y ago
>Since most my time is spent concentrating on understanding code, the last thing I want is an editor that forces me to consciously think about text operations. "d[downkey]4" might be theoretically more efficient, but I spend way less cognitive energy holding down the shift key and pressing the down arrow 4 times. The point is well taken, but don't forget that for most people that downside of increased cognitive pressure goes away after a few days or weeks of regular vim usage. I've been using it for about a year and all the combos I normally use are second nature to me (and have been for months). Don't underestimate the human brain's ability to grow and adapt and for incredibly complicated things to quickly turn into routine. For the record, I almost never use vim's much touted hit a number key then an action to do it n times feature. I have modified it so j and k do the normal down/up one line and J K go down/up seven lines or so for scrolling. [1] If I'm doing something like deleting a line and have to delete a bunch (common case), then I'll "dd" to delete line and then hit "." (which repeats the last action) three or four times until satisfied. Way easier than counting the number of lines to delete then typing "4dd" imo. [1] Note for anyone who wants to duplicate this: it was still unbearably slow to just hold down J or K to scroll because the default delay between depressing a key and when OSX decides you are actually holding it down and not just pressing it once is too long. Decrease it in the native settings of your OS for a smoother experience.

tygorius 11y ago

No other text editor has as many developers working on plugins than VIM. Virtually anything that exists in another text editor which isn’t mouse driven has some very popular, very supported, very documented plugin you can use. And the Vim equivalent of org mode is what again? I'm a Steve Litt fan, but Vim Outliner isn't even in the same league as org mode. As a Vim user of many years I still believe it to be superior to emacs when it comes to editing text. That said, emacs is a vastly superior programming environment. And like many people I find org mode to be indispensible. Happily, these things aren't either/or situations. I still use Vim for quick text editing tasks, but for other matters evil+org mode lets me have the best of both worlds. Edit: typos

falcolas 11y ago
> And the Vim equivalent of org mode is what again? VimWiki: https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki Not 100% of the same functionality, but close enough for me as to not matter. For the missing features, I have the rest of the OS.

homulilly 11y ago

I use vim on a daily basis and think it's a great editor, but it's definitely overhyped. Plugins in particularly are pretty disappointing if you're coming from an editor like sublime. Off the top of my head, syntax checking, fuzzy searching and multicursor options are all perfectly usable but very limited compared to sublime's offerings.

lewisl9029 11y ago

Eventually, I'm hoping for some keyboard/mouse hybrid like this to catch on: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1666150716/keymousetm-the-keyboard-and-mouse-re-invented/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1666150716/keymousetm-t... I didn't end up backing it though because I didn't want to dump $250 on a v1 product would likely have many issues to sort out. That and the ergonomics of the typing didn't look that great.

anotherevan 11y ago
Personally, I think this one looks better: http://www.combimouse.com/ http://www.combimouse.com/