• Naich@lemmings.world
    7·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • kevincox@lemmy.ml
      3·
      2 months ago

      What are you running MS-DOS? laughs in multi-tasking.

      I just drag my vi terminals to another workspace and launch a new editor.

    • davidgro@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
      3·
      2 months ago

      Getting used to vim has made nano unusable for me. The muscle memory is too strong. That and all of the regex and plugin features (ex. LSP) are just too useful.

        • kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          2 months ago

          I use macros to solve most of the same problems. You just on-the-fly record a sequence of regular vim commands that you can then replay as many times as you need. Great for formatting a bunch of data without having to deal with the misery of regex

      • ArchAengelus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        2 months ago

        I had the same experience. Nano is great if you’re used to notepad or a generic, limited text editor.

        Once you learn a terminal editor like eMacs or vim, why go back? So much less hand motion going to mouse, arrows, and back.

      • 299792458ms@lemmy.zip
        1·
        2 months ago

        I tried Micro and I found that its just Nano with a better interface and much easier to use. Its great actually but I like the vim movements.

  • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    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?

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
      4·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
        2·
        2 months ago

        It’s intuitive if your previous editor was ed(1) and you’re using an ADM-3A-like keyboard.

      • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        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 _

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
          1·
          2 months ago

          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.

    • kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      4·
      2 months ago

      tl;dr: Run vimtutor, learn vim, enjoy life

      It’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 3w moves three words forward.

      d is the delete command. You combine it with a movement command that tells it what to delete. So dw deletes one word and d3w deletes 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 vimtutor in a console near you to get started on the path to salvation efficient editing.

      • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
        0·
        2 months ago

        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

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
          1·
          2 months ago

          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 .vimrc should 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.

            • rezifon@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              2 months ago

              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.

            • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
              1·
              2 months ago

              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 .vimrc as my muscle memory transitioned. So having less to fiddle also made it easier for me to keep my .vimrc tuned to my muscle memory.

              For example, I was using / instead of Ctrl+F because I liked it better within a month or two.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 months ago

        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.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      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 vi installed, but I’ve seen a few without nano.

            • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
              1·
              2 months ago

              ed is sadly not installed by default on some modern distros. Even vi is often a symlink to vim in vi-mode.

              • kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                1·
                2 months ago

                Really? Not that I’d notice, but I assumed ed was so tiny that there wouldn’t be any reason to not include it. (Ubuntu has it and it’s 59KB)

                Asking for vi and getting vim is just a pleasant surprise :)

  • ludicolo@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Anytime I open Vim I ask the same question.

    “how the fuck do I use you?”

    then go back to nano

    repeat.

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
        22·
        2 months ago

        Have you tried GUI text editors? They’re like the CLI ones, just from this millennium. We’re no longer etching runes into rocks any more either.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
            11·
            2 months ago

            Sometimes it’s not so easy to fire up a GUI, like when you ssh into another machine.

            CLI text editors have their specific use cases. For all other cases GUI ones (Kate, VSCode,…) exist.

            • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
              1·
              2 months ago

              CLI text editors have their specific use cases.

              Couldn’t agree more. My use cases tend to be:

              • text editor
              • note taking
              • IDE
              • config editor
              • log viewer
              • adhoc data prep
              • json viewer

              EMACS users sometimes add web browser and email client, among other things but, that’s a bit further than I go. The perf for either of the main two blows nearly any GUI editor out of the water and being able to pipe stdout/stderr to them is just the wonderful cherry on top.

            • Revan343@lemmy.ca
              1·
              1 month ago

              That’s “graphical oowey”, right? /s

              I generally just say the letters; the amount of shit I get for saying gee en you…is not actually that much because I usually don’t interact with coding nerds via voice, only text, but if I did they would be livid

              Edit: For some reason I try to pronounce Xfce as a word instead of an initialism though, ‘ecks-fiss’. Maybe I’m just broken.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
            0·
            2 months ago

            Hopefully tongue-in-cheek.

            No.

            Because sure. Microsoft Word is the best IDE.

            Learn the difference between a word processor and a text editor.

            • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
              1·
              2 months ago

              Guess you’re not up on your memes. Frightfully sorry for responding to what I assumed was a meme answer with a meme answer.

    • HouseWolf@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Notepadqq is basically an exact clone of Notepad++ but native on Linux.

      I used it for a good while before recently switching to Kate.

  • regeya@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    I’m gonna laugh my ass off if someone finds out there was some obscure Emacs fork or clone designed to run Clojure or something, and it’s named Again