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Vim is a puzzle based text editor
Funny you should say that, because…
Exactly, it is lovely. Editing text with it is actually enjoyable.
The dopamine rush when you nail a complicated
%sregex search-and-replace first try is insaneAww yeah. Feels good.
Performing all those whacky movements and operations is nothing short of an arcade gaming experience.
Once you try Vim you will never use another text editor. Or any other program for that matter because you won’t be able to exit.
What are you running MS-DOS? laughs in multi-tasking.
I just drag my vi terminals to another workspace and launch a new editor.
I also had that experience with emacs, which has a built in help system. I couldn’t find a topic on ‘exit’ or ‘quit’ and refused to just search online.
Took me half an hour.
I’m editor bilingual but im a bit rusty in Emacs, so skill check: its C-x C-c right?
Ctrl + meta + butterfly
Yes. Though I believe it only kills the current frame if there are multiple
No, I think that exits. C-c k kills the buffer, C-x 0 (zero) will kill the frame. But I may have changed my binds and can never remember which is window and which is frame in emacs terms.
However, it’s somewhat moot as just about everywhere you run emacs, it’ll open up in gui mode and you can use the file menu. (Or use F10 to bring up the menus in terminal, but I have no idea where on the manual it would say that)
and refused to just search online
Unless you were f*cked by your ISP as I am right now, that’s having some balls. Or being masochist. But nothing in between
I really didn’t want to let it win.
Emacs
ed is the standard text editor.
Sudo apt install AGAIN!
reinstalling all packages... removing ace-of-penguins... installing ace-of-penguins... removing apt... installing apt... error: apt does not exist! dispose of computer.bash: found the mobile user
This incident will be reported!
Genuinely took most of my notes in college on vim, when you get good it’s just faster.
I’m sure someone already made a graph plotting the hours wasted learning vs the seconds gained not moving your mouse.
Nice.
I’ve been using Vim daily for about 20 years, it saves me 30 minutes at a time regularly.
I’m approaching break-even on the learning curve!
I’m kidding…mostly.
This. If it was your sole tool for daily tasks it makes sense, once a month to edit a config file…not so much.
When I started working we had HP Unix Silicon Graphics systems, VI was our only text editor…so I have some commands as muscle memory. The rest of commands I open my tractor feed help printout from 30 years ago
What about notepad++ under wine?
Notepadqq is basically an exact clone of Notepad++ but native on Linux.
I used it for a good while before recently switching to Kate.
Haven’t heard about Notepadqq. How different is it from Kate?
Pretty much just a different GUI, If you ever used Notepad++ it’s the same as that.
I’m trying… I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd ringo.
If I wanted to hear about what’s good about Vim, should I:
a) ask what’s good about vim
-OR-
b) assert blindly that there is nothing good about vim so fanboys will come crawling out of the walls tripping over each other to tell me how I’m wrong?
tl;dr: Run
vimtutor, learn vim, enjoy lifeIt’s extremely powerful, for mostly the same reason that it’s incomprehensible to newbies. It’s focused not on directly inputting characters from your keyboard, but on issuing commands to the editor on how to modify the text.
These commands are simple but combine to let you do exactly what you want with just a few keypresses.
For example:
w is a movement command that moves one word forward.
You can put a number in front of any command to repeat it that many times, so
3wmoves three words forward.d is the delete command. You combine it with a movement command that tells it what to delete. So
dwdeletes one word andd3wdeletes the next three words.f is the find movement command. You press it and then a character to move to the first instance of that character. So
f.will move to the end of the current sentence, where the period is.Now, knowing only this, if you wanted to delete the next two sentences, you could do that by pressing
d2f.Hopefully I gave a taste of how incredibly powerful, flexible, yet simple this system is. You only need to know a handful of commands to use vim more effectively than you ever could most other editors. And there are enough clever features that any time you think “I wish there was a better way to do this” there most certainly is (as well as a nice description of how).
It also comes with a guide to help you get over the initial learning curve, run
vimtutorin a console near you to get started on the path tosalvationefficient editing.I’m not against that,
But if ctrl+f doesn’t let me type a search term then I’m going to scream
The war could have been avoided if user had the option to easily rebind any key/action
But if ctrl+f doesn’t let me type a search term then I’m going to scream
It’s been awhile since I’ve bothered to remap a key in Vim, but adding this to
.vimrcshould do it for you:nnoremap <C-f> /I started with a bunch of these to let me keep using existing muscle memory while training new.
Is there a .vimrc that already maps all the standard notepad++ keybindings in one go ?
Is there a .vimrc that already maps all the standard notepad++ keybindings in one go ?
You may find someone who has one, but I just did the ones I found myself missing as I encountered them.
I tried someone’s all-in-one
.vimrc, but it broke too many community recipes while rebinding a bunch of shortcuts that weren’t in my muscle memory anyway.I kept adjusting my
.vimrcas my muscle memory transitioned. So having less to fiddle also made it easier for me to keep my.vimrctuned to my muscle memory.For example, I was using
/instead ofCtrl+Fbecause I liked it better within a month or two.There are better editors to learn if your goal is to not learn vi.
In vi, search is not only used for searching, but also for navigation. Demoting search from an easy-to-reach single key to a difficult-to-press chorded key combination breaks one of vi’s core philosophies, natural editing flow, and will significantly reduce your enjoyment and efficiency using the editor.
Doesn’t matter we will tell you either way.
- Instead of simply shortcuts, vim uses “chords”. Every new shortcut I learn can be combined intuitively* with all the other shortcuts I know.
- Because of this there’s no faster way to edit files than Vim in the hands of an experienced user.
- this let’s me spend almost no time editing code, freeing up the rest of my time for swearing at piss poor documentation.
* I use “intuitively” here in a way that not merely stretches, but outright abuses the definition of the word.
It’s intuitive if your previous editor was ed(1) and you’re using an ADM-3A-like keyboard.
It’s intuitive if your previous editor was ed(1) and you’re using an ADM-3A-like keyboard.
Exactly! Ha!
Thank you for telling me all this neat stuff! :D
I think I get what you are intending to imply by the word “intuitively”; it’s that it eventually becomes as reflexive and fluid as touch-typing itself.
Gosh you make it sound almost like you play Vim like an instrument more than use it…!
Honestly that sounds cool _
I think I get what you are intending to imply by the word “intuitively”; it’s that it eventually becomes as reflexive and fluid as touch-typing itself.
Exactly like that!
It’s also another source of the many “I can’t exit Vim” jokes, because it is now genuinely disorienting for me to try to edit text without Vim key bindings.
Gosh you make it sound almost like you play Vim like an instrument more than use it…!
That’s a great analogy. It does very much feel that way.
Honestly that sounds cool _
It is pretty cool.
Wether it’s really worth the learning curve is probably unique to each person that tries it. But for folks who need to edit a lot of text a lot of the time, it’s pretty great.
To add to your line of query, what if I don’t give a shit about writing code and I just use Linux as a casual laptop user? I’ve never looked at vim or emacs, I use Kate and OnlyOffice
Depends on how much you write. At some point the efficiency gain is probably worth learning vim anyway, but Kate is a nice editor and does the job.
I just like vim, it feels nice.
Using Neovim with qmv had been amazing for when I needed to standardize seasion and episode numbers/titles for my jellyfin library.
What kind of things would we be gaining efficency for? Markdown? It seems graphically to be a very spartan program. If I’m only writing text, what value would I gain from learning vim versus a graphical text editor that incorporates markdown and page design?
If you want to do document editing, then neither vim nor Kate are editors that do that. They are for editing text. You can write markdown, if you like, and then use pandoc or other tools to convert that to a printable document. I always use LaTeX if I need a pretty output, but that also has somewhat of a steep learning curve.
What you gain is the ability to manipulate text very efficiently. It’s hard to describe, but it kind of feels like a lower overhead protocol of communicating to the computer what i want it to do to the text compared to “normal” editors. Again, if you only rarely write stuff, it might not be worth it, but it feels great
For just regular text to be consumed by humans, it’s not that great, you probably want a word processor.
It shines when you do a lot of more structural editing, stuff like “change all quotation marks on this line to be single tick”, “copy everything inside these parentheses and paste it after the equals sign”, “make the first word on the next five lines uppercase”, these are the type of things vim make easy that are not easy in other editors.
So it’s great for code and config files. Markdown is borderline. You can have a setup that lets you live view how the markdown renders while editing in vim, so it can be pretty good, but the advantage might be a bit dubious.
You shouldn’t talk about vim at all! Just write that vscode is the most flexible code editor.
It does have a vim plugin, so it’s a perfectly fine editor
Don’t use Microsoft’s version. Use Vscodium! :)
I’ve seen vscode fill up home directories unnecessarily when run on the machine directly as well as remotely!
IMO vscode is a perfect example of recent software that looks great from a features pov but horrible from an efficient implementation pov. I loved it until I hated it.
They’re both fine choices.
Vim has been around long enough that I’ve found anything I want to figure out how to do has been discussed many times on various places around the internet and have yet to fail to find what I’m looking for with a search.
I do everything with cat, sed and awk.
Fuck your TUIs.
But how do you write your awk script?
cat > filename << ENDof course.chatgpt
This, but Emacs
With evil installed
HELL naw
Might as well just use Vim then
Org-mode in Emacs is the best though. That is why i use Emacs with Evil.
This, but Emacs
Nooo not the pinky ! :(
(setq evil-mode 'pinky)
Also; Don’t use vim.
Yeah, neovim is better
😂
i haven’t tried it but I’m sick of ubuntu being years behind on vim versions, what’s good about neovim?
what’s good about neovim?
- NeoVim supports plugins written in modern languages without a Vim script shim. Vim script is utterly awful, and the sooner we can all pretend it never happened, the better the world will be.
- NeoVim can be confirmed and extended with
luaa language that many people actually like to use. - NeoVim is built client/server style, like VSCodium, so it can do the same remote/local mix and match tricks. Notably, VSCodium works nicely as a front end for editing files with NeoVim.
- NeoVim is somehow actually faster. vim was no slouch, but a full rewrite seems to have added some…ahem…vim.
Much prefer Mirco thank you very much.
NANO GANG RISE
for everything else, there’s sublime.
I tend to work on customer systems where I’m not allowed to install anything. I’ve yet to encounter one that doesn’t have
viinstalled, but I’ve seen a few withoutnano.vi is part of the POSIX standard, so it’ll be available in some form on almost anything UNIX-flavoured
Which is a great reason to at least familiarize yourself with it. It’s the lingua franca of text editors.
Unless you wanted to learn to use ed (which you don’t)
ed is sadly not installed by default on some modern distros. Even vi is often a symlink to vim in vi-mode.
Really? Not that I’d notice, but I assumed
edwas so tiny that there wouldn’t be any reason to not include it. (Ubuntu has it and it’s 59KB)Asking for
viand gettingvimis just a pleasant surprise :)
If you like Sublime, you’re gonna love Micro.
What is Again! ? Never heard of that text editor
there is no text editor there is only nano
You’re entitled to your wrong opinion
