vim overhyped as an editor? It might be overhyped as a programming tool (you won... (2024)

farresito on Aug 3, 2015 | parent | context | favorite | on: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

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.

vim overhyped as an editor? It might be overhyped as a programming tool (you won... (1)

melling on Aug 3, 2015 | next [–]

The great think about VIM is that it lets you do the same about of work with less effort. Over your lifetime, you might type half as many keystrokes to do the same amount of work. Look at VimGolf and the following video to see what I mean.

http://www.vimgolf.com

https://vimeo.com/53144573 - Precision editing at the speed of thought

All editors should place an emphasis on minimal typing.

Emacs has a few cool precision features too:

http://emacsrocks.com/e10.html - AceJump

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farresito on Aug 3, 2015 | parent | next [–]

The thing I appreciate the most about vim is not the fact that you can be a little bit faster with a lot of things; it's the fact that you can edit code for hours and you won't get tired at all. At least you won't get even close to as tired as you would were you using a mouse. It's simply the least painful of all the ways out there. I guess it's the main reason I use it.

Thank you for the links. I do use the AceJump equivalent for vim, and I have it mapped to <space>. It's quite nice, actually :). The only difference is that instead of pressing <space> and getting all the jumps available for each word out there, I press <space> followed by two letters, and it jumps directy to the word which starts with those two letters, or it simply shows me links to words that start with said letters if there's more than a word starting with those letters.

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mateuszf on Aug 3, 2015 | prev | next [–]

> No other editor stands next to vim

And no other operating system stands next to emacs.

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farresito on Aug 3, 2015 | parent | next [–]

I knew someone would answer that. It was just a matter of time.

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dkns on Aug 3, 2015 | root | parent | next [–]

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'.

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FreeFull on Aug 3, 2015 | prev | next [–]

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.

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farresito on Aug 3, 2015 | parent | next [–]

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.

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FreeFull on Aug 3, 2015 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

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farresito on Aug 3, 2015 | root | parent | next [–]

Interesting. I've already given it a short try and I can see some differences. Do you use it as your main editor when you need to use an editor?

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FreeFull on Aug 3, 2015 | root | parent | next [–]

Yes, I do use it as my main editor (I have "vim" aliased to start kakoune instead). Knowledge on how to use kakoune doesn't seem to interfere when I need to use vim for some reason (such as ssh-ing into some machine that doesn't have kakoune).

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martanne on Aug 3, 2015 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I too find kakoune interesting and have recently begun to add multiple cursor/selection support to my vim like editor.

https://github.com/martanne/vis

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sea6ear on Aug 3, 2015 | prev | next [–]

Yet the ancient Evil* from the elder world that is Emacs plots to consume Vim and absorb it's functionality. When that day is fulfilled what other editor will be able to stand?

* http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

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sankho on Aug 3, 2015 | prev [–]

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.