Reasons To Give The Vim Text Editor A Chance

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-7-reasons-to-give-the-vim-text-editor-a-chance/

by surfingdino • 15 years ago

41 67 15 years ago

My reasons for being a vim user a lot more practical than those I see on these "top 10 reasons for trying X":

- In the long run, it's faster to learn and use an "efficiency" editor, so I need to learn one of vim, emacs, notepad++, etc. The differences between these are probably negligible for a proficient user.

- Of these, only vim will be installed (or vi, which has a big enough overlap that it won't matter to me) on every system I'm going to need to use.

These are, incidentally, the same reasons I use QWERTY instead of Dvorak.

singular• 15 years ago

Dvorak has actually been shown to really be no better than QWERTY - http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/3

OneWhoFrogs• 15 years ago

You're right about that, but Dvorak is much easier on the hands. The average distance travelled by your fingers is greatly reduced. (It looks like Colemak beats both, though: http://colemak.com/Compare.)

aerique• 15 years ago

I used to use Dvorak at home and QWERTY at work (as to not annoy my co-workers) and switching between them was a non-issue.

jcromartie• 15 years ago

There's a big exception to the "vim will be installed" rule: Windows.

2muchcoffeeman• 15 years ago

And what windows installation comes with any dev tools by default? You are going to have to install a bunch of stuff anyway. Install Vim.

Diabeetus• 15 years ago

Coincidentally, all the points equally apply to Emacs. Well, except the last one, I guess.

wpinbacker• 15 years ago

Exactly. Emacs doesn't need an elaborate case for its defense; non-modal is more natural/easier-to-learn/BETTER (control-this, control-that) than modal. Not merely my 2 cents -- it's the TRUTH!

gcr• 15 years ago

Long time vim user here, and I'm considering learning emacs. How do you know it's the truth? And, how did you get started?

reso• 15 years ago

When they started pushing Unix on us in 2nd year CS, I hated VIM with a burning passion. After a little while of using it though, I can say my typing efficiency is far, far, higher than it was before, and I can "flow" better since I don't have to interrupt my stream-of-consciousness with a mouse movement. I wouldn't use anything else nowadays.

phatbyte• 15 years ago

I love vim, I use it daily, but always for quick text editing. For real coding I need an IDE (netbeans). I never understood how people can code without debugging, profiling, code exploring. I'll probably get voted down, but, what Vim saves me, I wasted it on debugging. So I don't see any advantage using it as my primary editor.

jrockway7• 15 years ago

Most people that use vim also don't use graphical debuggers. I use the "print" statement.

dekz2• 15 years ago

The only downside to print statements is forgetting to remove them and having some obnoxious message committed.

eropple7• 15 years ago

Spewing print statements all over a piece of code is as bad as any other shotgun debugging technique. The reason breakpoints and watches were invented were to reduce reliance on bad ways of doing things.

japherwocky4• 15 years ago

Someday, you'll get to work in a language that has a good REPL, and you'll never want to go back to printing. :)

jamesbritt2• 15 years ago

I never understood how people can code without debugging, profiling, code exploring.

I'm sure many vim users wonder the same thing. They may also wonder how people can develop using tools that are coupled to each other rather than choosing the various development tools as they see fit.

In any event it's not either/or. The times I've needed Netbeans, for example, I use vim for actual code editing and the IDE for assorted handy click-here-to-run things.

dekz2• 15 years ago

Theres also Eclim for Eclipse which will let you have one of a running modes: Headless eclipse, VIM embedded in the editor, or you can just open it externally.

gfodor• 15 years ago

most IDEs these days (intellij, eclipse, visual studio) have pretty kickass vim plugins so you can have your cake and eat it too.

shubble• 15 years ago

Most of the time, IDEs get these features by calling CLI programs. It's very easy to call CLI programs from VIM/EMACS, and set up bindings to make it very quick. As for code navigation, plugins let you navigate to functions, explore projects / directories, and intelisense.

On the one hand, when developing for a new platform or language, you spend some extra time tweaking on VIM, rather than being able to use the platform developers Eclipse GUI immediately. On the other hand, I've found that being exposed to the command line tools with all their arguments, you are more able to fix problems and automate tasks.

morganpyne• 15 years ago

It is actually possible to run full interactive debuggers inside vim. Personally I think Netbeans is a little easier on the eyes when doing this, but being the nerd I am I had to give it a go once I found out it was possible. Here's screenshot of me doing a debugging session of a PHP file using vim/Xdebug on OSX :-)

http://morganpyne.com/img/hacks/debugging-php-with-vim-and-x...

There are several articles out there on using vim as a fully-fledged IDE and setting up interactive debugging: http://www.koch.ro/blog/index.php?/archives/63-VIM-an-a-PHP-... http://tech.blog.box.net/2007/06/20/how-to-debug-php-with-vi... http://colonelpanic.net/2010/08/debugging-php-in-vim-using-v...

Note that these are for PHP development, but I'm sure some rummaging would uncover suport for whatever langugages you work in.

obiterdictum• 15 years ago

I'm a full-time Vim user.

This was my problem when I started with Vim. But then I learned to love GDB and other command-line development tools. At first it seemed a bit archaic to me, a Visual Studio user at the time, but when I got a hang of it, I stopped missing IDE debugging. Now I'm at the point where I feel crippled trying to develop in an IDE (no split windows, to vim-style macros, inefficient use of screen space, constantly have to switch between mouse and keyboard).

For example, GDB can be scripted, so you can repeat debugging sessions, your entire debugging session is printed, so you can always go back and see the history of changed values. It supports pretty-printing STL containers and you can add your own pretty-printers in python.

There are a lot more to these tools than you can discover by poking and trying things like you would with an IDE, they have a steeper learning curve, but I wouldn't dismiss them immediately as a waste of time.

ericb• 15 years ago

What about project-wide find and replace? I have been looking to switch to vim, but I do this fairly often and don't see anything that compares to what a good ide can do in vim (without bash command madness).

japherwocky4• 15 years ago

Well.. apparently people are using "print" still, but fwiw, most professionals I know (including myself) who use vim also use screen, which lets you keep your commandline utils for debugging, etc, a keystroke or two away.

blackman2• 15 years ago

There is no reason you can't use both. I tend to structure my projects using an IDE but do most of my text editing in vim.

Nothing beats vim for grunting through a pile of code that needs cleaning up. Just set up your IDE and vim to autoload when it detects changes.

My workflow generally goes Edit in vim -> check IDE for syntax errors -> Run/Debug -> repeat.

IvarTJ• 15 years ago

I chose it because I am under the impression that it is more ergonomic than Emacs and mainstream text editing environments. I learnt the basics of Emacs before I learnt vi/m.

16s• 15 years ago

My reason for using vi/vim is that it's the lowest common denominator text editor. You'll find it by default on most any Linux or BSD system.

surfingdino• 15 years ago

That's my reason too. I use it on Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and MS Windows. I like TextMate for some tasks better than Vim, but my ratio of time spent in both is still 9:1 (Vim:TextMate).

CJefferson• 15 years ago

I've tried hard to love vim, but as a programmer's editor, for C++, it's just awful.

Now, many of the problems are because C++ is awful (hard to parse, for indenting / formatting), and C++ compilers are awful (20 page error messages).

In particular, I tried half a dozen packages and none could tame C++ template error messages, while xcode, visual studio and cde in eclipse all mastered this years ago. A shame.

doorhammer2• 15 years ago

I've been tooling around with emacs, having plopped down vimpulse and viper on it. I get slime for clojure, the power of elisp for modifications and so on, as well as my preferred editing style, which is modal. It's not for everyone, but it works for me. It helps that my life isn't terribly busy, and I enjoy taking the time to make everything work together. Of course, caps rebinding is a must for either.

It's been fun, either way. Time will tell if it ends up being practical.

gnosis2• 15 years ago

When I started learning Lisp, I tried using Emacs with viper and vimpulse.

Although it did make using Emacs less painful, it still required way too much knowledge of Emacs to use effectively and configure than I had time to dedicate to learning it.

Emacs+SLIME+vimpulse+viper might be good enough for someone who already knows Emacs or who hasn't invested a lot of time in learning vim. But for someone fluent in vim, I just don't think huge time investment in learning Emacs well is worth it.

doorhammer2• 15 years ago

That's completely understandable. I really don't have a huge reason to be doing things this way. I've just been going through The Joy of Clojure and decided to give emacs a spin, and I wanted some similar editing idioms while messing with it.

I've basically been translating the shortcuts and techniques I use in vim into some ugly elisp, bit by bit, assuming they don't work as expected with vimpule/viper. I wouldn't say it's an amazing solution, but mucking through the emacs docs to get things working has been a quick way to get a basic proficiency in how emacs works, and how elisp can be used.

Ultimately I still end up in vim for most of my editing, and I keep tacking things onto emacs as I go, but mostly when I'm just writing some clojure. I wouldn't say it's efficient at all; it's just interesting enough to kill time with because my life isn't very busy and it seems 'nifty'.

TheEzEzz2• 15 years ago

Just last week I was about to start learning Vim, but after perusing the shortcut list I decided I could do better, so I rolled my own. Basically it's just a multi-modal keystroke catcher/dispatcher running transparently in the background. The upshot is that most of the commands work transparently in my IDE, in notepad, and even this little textbox I'm typing in right now!

Unfortunately, the original point was to increase my productivity, which I've failed at horribly... because I can't stop playing around with the code!

sant0sk1• 15 years ago

Open source it and we can all waste time playing with the code!

TheEzEzz2• 15 years ago

Definitely. I'm gonna dogfood it a few more weeks and then throw it up on github.

gnosis2• 15 years ago

"Basically it's just a multi-modal keystroke catcher/dispatcher running transparently in the background. The upshot is that most of the commands work transparently in my IDE, in notepad, and even this little textbox I'm typing in right now!"

This sounds very interesting.

I've long wanted vim integration with Opera, so I'm not stuck with its relatively primitive editing features when I'm filling out a text input box. Unfortunately, vim does not integrate with other apps very easily.[1] So something along the lines you're working on would be very welcome, even if it is primitive compared to vim.

One thing I hope it can do is have an easy way to activate and deactivate it, so it doesn't interfere with editing in vim itself.

[1] http://www.freehackers.org/VimIntegration

chernevik• 15 years ago

Reason 8: Vim keystrokes can be incorporated into ex scripts, either alone or in "here" scripts. These commands are already useful, they can do stuff like replace strings in lines that are N lines above or below lines holding another string, and they can be leveraged further via scripting.

For example, a search and replace across files under the working directory:

tgt_string=$1

repl_string=$2

for file_name in $(grep -rl "$tgt_str")

do

ex - $file_name << END_HERE_SCRIPT

%s/$tgt_string/$repl_string/g

END_HERE_SCRIPT

    done

Yes, the indentation of the "here" script is ugly, white space before line texts can bork execution.

Yes, sed or awk can do very similar things, maybe better. My point is, it's nice to get some of these capabilities just by knowing your editor.

(Ed: Sorry about the formatting, if I don't double-space the script it turns into one large text clump.)

vacri2• 15 years ago

It's not surprising to see that the logo isn't amongst the list :)

I use a mix of Elvis and Vim as I'm training up on vi-likes, and I'm not sure which I prefer yet. Vim has more-intuitive-to-me stuff like character-by character deleting (ie characters are removed when you delete, not when you leave Insert mode), but elvis has things like pressing = twice to reflow paragraphs.

Vim may win in the end as Elvis is hard to google for...

koenigdavidmj• 15 years ago

Vim can reflow too, but I will admit that 'gwap' is a bit unintuitive...

vacri2• 15 years ago

cool, thanks for that!

Reasons To Give The Vim Text Editor A Chance

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