My professor was always trying to get us to use vim or eMacs over an IDE to write our C programs. I’m sorry, I like using a mouse. I know, I know, blasphemy. I’m taking a shortcut. I’m a noob.
When I absolutely have to, I go for vim, mostly because I know a few of the key bindings for it, but otherwise avoid it.
I’m taking a shortcut
more like a longcut. I save so much time and effort not having to switch my right hand between the mouse and keyboard constantly
I keep my hands on my laptop and use my thumb on the track pad. My hands don’t leave the keyboard. I actually never use extra mice or extra keyboards.
track pad
it’s okay, we’re gonna make a plan and get you to safety. Pretend you’re ordering a pizza. How many people are currently holding you captive?
Sublime gang rise up 😭
That can’t be right, the red car has a service manual and too many functioning assemblies for it to be VS.
If Vim is so good, then why can’t you browse Lemmy from it?
This meme was made by the Emacs gang.
Because unlike emacs gang, we don’t need to build an OS to browse Lemmy.
How bout you go back and let your friends know that if they’re in need of a good editor, try Vim ;)
Vim needs are met by using Evil-Mode. You don’t have to leave Emacs for this.
As a poke at Emacs’ creeping featurism, vi advocates have been known to describe Emacs as “a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war
:P
*stealthily closes nano window and closes laptop lid…
How bout you go back and let your friends know that if they’re in need of a good editor, try Vim ;)
If my friends wanted a good editor, then I wouldn’t recommend a Vimitor, I’d recommend ed, the standard text EDitor :p
Haha, y’all are welcome to try that ;)
codium > code
Hadn’t heard of this, but I’m going to switch now!
The full name is VScodium. https://vscodium.com/
Codium is a genus of edible green macroalgae.
Ooooh thank you for reminding me I need to make this switch
helix gang anyone?
epic editor :3
:3
👋 present!
I like VScodium and VIM although I have also been using Kate and nano as of late.
Meanwhile, James rocks up with Notepad++
smh real programmers use magnetized needles on tape
Couldn’t help myself
The Fiat Panda of text editors
tbh, one of the essential things vim gets right for me is that it’s designed as a text editor, not (only) a code editor. I use it for so much non-code text as well, but it feels weird opening a coding tool for such things.
laughs in Emacs
Have been a professional software engineer for 8 years now. Have yet to find a reason to use vim for anything (other than availability of course, but if nano isn’t installed for some godforsaken reason I have other problems lol).
I’ve been in various forms of coding and administration for around fifteen years now. Despite trying lots of editors, I have yet to find a reason to use anything but vim.
I do like obsidian for note taking.
edit: Removed typo.
Professional software engineer here, using vim as my primary editor.
Vim is a way more competent editor than nano. If you spend a lot of time editing files via ssh, vim is amazing. And when you get bitten by it, you’re infected. ;-)
I used to think this way. Until I found that with emacs you can edit any file on an SSH enabled computer remotely. Meaning that not only are you no longer constrained by what the computer has installed. But you can use your personality configured editor while editing that file. It’s called tramp.
BTW, with Emacs you can use vim key bindings evil-mode, so don’t stress about that.
Tramp is more featured, but if all one cares about is being able to edit remote files using a local editor, vim can edit remote files with scp too: scp://user@server[:port]//remote/file.txt
I tried tramp-mode at some point, but I seem to remember some gotchas with LSP and pretty bleh latency, which didn’t make it all that useful to me… But I admittedly didn’t spend much time in emacs land.
I’ve also used sshfs to mount a remote directory and edit using my local editor/env.
You can do that with vscode too. And probably many IDEs.
The only real reason for which you would need to use vim in such cases is if the target computer can’t run the vscode server, which I’ve never encountered yet.
I’m talking about not needing anything installed on the server though. Like you don’t need sudo. If the server has ssh then you can use Emacs to edit a file on it
Don’t need sudo or anything pre installed for vscode either. It will send the server to the machine via SSH and then run it automagically.
Fair. But to a sysadmin or devops engineer availability is pretty important.
I use vim btw
I use neovim btw
I use vim, aliased to vi, on Arch btw.
The comparison is bad. It’s more like comparing a kind of crappy car to a nice unicycle once you factor in UX. Not everyone likes to punch in key combinations so complicated it’s making game cheats look simple in comparison.
I would argue that vim is fantastic for a lot of editing and coding tasks, just not all of them.
Where it utterly fails is with deep trees of files in codebases, like you see in Java or some Javascript/Typescript apps. Even with a robust suite of add-ons, you wind up backing into full-bore IDE territory to manage that much filesystem complexity. Only difference is that navigating and managing a large file tree w/o a mouse is kind of torture.
Fuzzy finding really shine for this use case, no need for a mouse.
File-based navigation is often inefficient anyway (symbolic navigation is much better when you can), but if you do need it, that’s what fuzzy finders are for. Blows any mouse-based navigation out of the water.
The only time a visual structure is useful is when you are actually just interested in learning how things are structured for whatever reason, but for that task,
treeworks just fine anyway.Once I got used to single-directory filetree browsing plus fuzzy finding, I have never been able to comfortably use a traditional filetree anymore. most of them are not designed for efficient keyboard use (vscode and intellij at least) and don’t really help understanding the structure of the project imo (unless there arent that many files). For massive projects I find it easier to spend the initial effort of learning a few directory names and the vague structure using oil.nvim, and then eventually I can just find what I need almost instantly by fuzzy finding.
It always surprises me how complicated some of the editor tooling sounds in threads like this. Obviously once you learn how to use these things they are powerful, but how do people have the patience to deal with all of that in the beginning? This is coming from a guy who writes scripts constantly to avoid doing tedious, error-prone things.
Also I keep seeing people say vscode is slow. One of the reasons I switched to it is that it’s insanely fast compared to other editors I used (even those with far-inferior featuresets) 🤷♂️
