• OpenStars@startrek.website
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        10 months ago

        You don’t ever close vim. You pray to the gods and hope that vim chooses to quit for you. (technically accurate if you think about it - i.e. otherwise you leave swap files all over the place:-P)

        And hope that you do not mess up and summon a daemon instead:-P.

  • azimir@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    If an IDE doesn’t have vi key bindings it isn’t going to be used by me. That’s what finally get me to change from terminal only dev to vscode. Until I found the vi editing extension the IDE wasn’t of interest.

    Yes, vi is just that good.

    I hear emacs bindings are also great, but I just know how to save and exit from emacs.

    • Drew Belloc@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      I use doom emacs and have to say, it takes everything that I like about vim and adds to emacs, plus a lot of useful features that i would have to install myself otherwise that can be enable by just uncommenting a feel lines in the config file.

      It’s can feel a bit bloated at first but allows me to have the perfect IDE (for me at least) in a matter of minutes.

      And the best of all is that I don’t need to use the emacs keybinds if I don’t wanna (and I don’t).

      • azimir@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        One of the interesting aspects of humanity is how much people like given text editing methods. There’s a handful of approaches and after learning one or two, people really figure out what works for them.

        I am more than happy to say I like vim, but in the end you should use what you like best. Just done be surprised when I can write and edit a ton of text really fast while your nano session is comfortable, but slow.

  • Cypher@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    This is bound to be an unpopular opinion here but I hate vim.

    Shortcuts in vim make no sense whatsoever. They’re not the fastest possible shortcuts nor are they intuitive.

    Sure it’s got useful features if you let the awful design brow beat you into memorising an absurd number of shortcuts that lack any form of logic.

    You could have a cheat sheet on another monitor but at that point why not have an editor that has a gui.

    • OpenStars@startrek.website
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      10 months ago

      The reason is b/c vim predates GUIs. Yes, as in all of them:-D. (Or rather, its predecessor vi did and vim unlike others very much remained true to its origins)

      Even now, there are many places e.g. when doing server maintenance or accessing a compute cluster via SSH, sometimes you do not have a handy GUI environment accessible, at which point your choices become extremely limited, and it helps that vim has been installed on every Unix-i/Linux-ish machine since the 80s.

      GUIs are superior, ofc, when they work. On a daily basis I even use a GUI for vim - MacVim (for Windows there used to be Cream but I am very out of date there), and there is always gVim. I could use something else but I am familiar with vim and it is EXTREMELY powerful - e.g. I could indent 100,000 lines in the middle of a file without having to manually select all of them at once first, or better still only do the indentation based on matching a pattern.

      It is very advanced, and thus not for everyone, and even those of us that use it often prefer the GUI way for simple tasks like select a contiguous block of 5 lines, but it offers the benefit that it works in the widest possible number of scenarios - e.g. more than nano. emacs does too, except its commands are so configurable that the X-windows GUI number 1, X-windows GUI number 2, and command-line versions all use entirely different shortcuts, so a cheat sheet would not help. vim offers consistency that, afaik, is absolutely unmatched anywhere.

      Now you know:-).

      • Doc Avid Mornington@midwest.social
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        10 months ago

        Even when Emacs had two GUI versions, the default keys were pretty much the same between them, as far as I recall, excepting features missing from one or the other. For a very long time now, it’s all been reconciled as GNU Emacs, anyhow, whether CLI or XWin GUI, or even on a Mac or (shudder) MS Windows. I just use my local running Emacs, with my preferred configuration, to edit files anywhere, such as inside a running container on a remote server in AWS, so it’s pretty consistent for me.

        • OpenStars@startrek.website
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          10 months ago

          Thanks for the update - I so rarely use emacs that I might be guilty of misinformation here, as in what may have been true two decades ago is not any longer. I’ll try to remember that.:-)

    • drmeanfeel@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I was shoved into Linux by a nearly dead HPC expert who was definitely angry about the advent of electricity.

      Wasn’t given any indication of a text editor, I ran across vim for one reason or another and enjoyed his Palpatine-like reaction from seeing me using vim enough to keep using it. And if you’re enjoying something, why not

      But yeah, it has some drawbacks lol

      • pineapple_santa@feddit.de
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        10 months ago

        Having a mentor like this is unfathomably valuable. The kind that knows exactly when a printer problem should be fixed with a sledgehammer and are not afraid to apply the “fix”.

    • kazaika@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Its more about using your own shortcuts if you dont like some which is what you should do whatever editor you use

      • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        So then what makes vim special? From what I understand it’s just a “standard” for shortcuts to features that can be shared between different editors, right?

        • crater2150@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          The special thing about vim are the different modes. In a editor which does not support modal editing, you can’t bind a letter key directly to a function, or else you can’t type that letter any more.

    • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Helix is great except when you switch to vim for whatever reason and everything is backwards

      • mac@infosec.pub
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        10 months ago

        This was the thing that stopped me from hopping over in the first place, the vim binds just make too much sense

        • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          Personally I kinda prefer helix bindings but vim bindings I think are far more useful to know when using anything other than helix

          • mac@infosec.pub
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            10 months ago

            Honestly I’m sure they are great but vim bindings are near ubiquitous amongst technologies now so it’s difficult to get everyone to move away from it.

  • Crow
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    10 months ago

    Vim actually has a surprising ammount of features already built in, you don’t even really need any Plugins. It has a file browser, terminal emulator, and window tiling built in

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    lol if you can’t use vim.

    Who cares that you can cut a perfect miter joint with a jig and a table saw when you can’t cut a butt joint with a hand saw.

    • 342345@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      I looked up miter joint and butt joint and I’m beginning to understand what you wanted to say.

      Yes, maybe.

      It doesn’t hurt to know the basic commands to insert, copy, paste with vim. But with bim, handling the tool always consumed a too big percentage of my attention in respect to doing the task at hand. I still use it for small file changes.

      • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        My comment really applies more to vi than vim but everyone’s using them interchangeably nowadays. When implementing systems where internet connection or excess install size aren’t possible or recommended, you gotta be able to work with the tools at hand.

        Of course, the comparison is custom cabinetry to ikea. Your local meth head needs to understand how to use hand tools because he or she may need to use them for myriad reasons ranging from “I don’t have the power version of this” to “it’s faster” to “the cut is cleaner” to “they pay me more to use this”. The person designing hudfł needs to be concerned first and foremost with how to shave a sixteenth off every panel so his accounting department doesn’t have to pay to reforest an extra hundred acres this year.

        Perhaps someone working entirely in programming has good reason to not know vim, but I still cling to the antiquated notion that the person designing furniture out of manufactured materials ought to be able to build a box you’d feel comfortable with company seeing.

  • N3Cr0@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    There is no point in typing the “m” in vim. Just edit your files with the vi shortcut.