The Grammar of Vim

http://rc3.org/2012/05/12/the-grammar-of-vim/

by daniel02216 • 14 years ago

125 37 14 years ago

gbog• 14 years ago

True but I'd say this verb-noun idiom only accounts to 15% of the user manual. For instance learning fold commands za will tell you nothing about other commands using 'a'.

mattbriggs4• 14 years ago

Text objects are the core of editing though, stuff like z or all the g commands are more situational. I replace the contents of a string (ci"), delete a word (daw), copy the contents of an array (yi]), etc WAY more often then things like folding

blt• 14 years ago

I have been using Vim for a few years. I recently installed a trial version of ViEmu plugin for Visual Studio. With Vim inside my main IDE at work, I have the chance to really master it. But I ran into an unexpected hiccup - nobody else can use it when we're collaborating on code! Sadly, I think this might be a big enough reason to remove it.

AlexFromBelgium3• 14 years ago

I am increasingly disappointed in all those Vim 'emulators'. VsVim, jVi, ... They aren't vim, no plugins, no real customizations. I really like that they exist, but it could be better. We need the REAL vim in an IDE, not some vim functionality.. EDIT: I use VsVim and you can disable it with ctrl+shift+F12. This helps when working together with other people..

edanm3• 14 years ago

Now THIS is a great idea.

vim lacks a lot of modern features, and the fact that it has to be compatible with running on shells means that it can't implement a lot of things which you would need to make it look and feel like a normal editor.

For example, we'd need the ability to make windows that are only part of the screen, in order to make convenient popups (for, say, ctrl-p find in files actions). We'd need the ability to have actual graphics to separate sections. We'd need the ability to have different fonts for different buffers. Etc.

What I think we need is an IDE which is just a layer on top of vim, which gives it a few things:

* a sidebar, ala NERDTree, only good-looking and consistent with how sidebars should act, e.g. doesn't move with the other window-movement commands, can't be changed to another buffer.

* Honest-to-God normal IDE Tabs, which let you have lots of open buffers, let you see them visually and switch between them normally.

* A buit-in, fast, find-in-project/find-tag/command-t like functionality, which has nice graphics to make it easy to use and is actually fast on any project.

Etc.

And all of this can be done on top of a normal vim, making it have the ability to have all of the old plugins and configurations works. Obviously a lot won't be necessary (e.g. NERDTree), but for GUI environments, this would absolutely make vim rock.

mattbriggs4• 14 years ago

IMO the only great vim emulator is evil mode for emacs :)

Derbasti• 14 years ago

I just disable ViEmu whenever other people sit down at my keyboard. The switch is right up there in the menu bar.

More recently though, I just open up Sublime Text and have them work in that. My computer, my rules.

jng• 14 years ago

Ctrl-Shift-Alt-V will toggle ViEmu on/off to help with that.

eagsalazar• 14 years ago

Stop programming on Windows, problem solved!

akurilin• 14 years ago

I've been reading through the brand new Practical Vim by Pragmatic Bookshelf, it goes pretty in depth in this and much much more: http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim

edanm3• 14 years ago

What is the level of the book? Is it worth getting if I'm a pretty heavy vim user already, or is it more of a beginner's guide?

farslan• 14 years ago

Same here. Need something for advance vim users.

antidoh• 14 years ago

"if you master the techniques in this book, you’ll never need another text editor. In 120 Vim recipes, you’ll quickly learn the editor’s core functionality"

If you're a heavy vim user then you probably already know the editor's core functionality.

"and tackle your trickiest editing and writing tasks"

But wait! Tricky tasks. It's for everybody!

nazri1• 14 years ago

I'd say the best way to learn more about vim if you are already a heavy vim user is to join both the vim-dev and vim users mailing list in google groups. People post questions in the vim user mailing list every day and I've learned many new things just by reading the answer that other people gave.

mwexler2• 14 years ago

A link, or links much like this describing the "grammar" of Vim, gets reposted every few months, which is probably fine because it's a good thing to learn and share, but it would be nice if there were a HN "Hall of Fame" which would prevent reposting things like this over and over and over again. It could have either posts, or "concepts" with some of the more popular posts about Vi/Vim/etc, Emacs, C++, etc.

(What reposts, you say? I was thinking of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2911930 or http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3361993 linking to Yan Pritzkers original post, referenced in parent link. But to be fair, they are different posts, not truly reposts.)

(However, there's also value in serendipity of new users "discovering" great links, so perhaps we can just leave well enough alone. Yeah, I know, useless comment when it takes both sides of a point).

sciurus• 14 years ago

And Yan Pritzker's post is primarily a summary of Jared Carroll's http://blog.carbonfive.com/2011/10/17/vim-text-objects-the-d...

adgar• 14 years ago

> Yeah, I know, useless comment when it takes both sides of a point

Incorrect. Given a subjective question, the most useful comments acknowledge and consider all possible answers according to their due weight.

mwexler2• 14 years ago

That's a nice thing to say, thanks. As I kept editing my comment, I kept thinking "Pick one side and stick to it... but I can't!"

stcredzero• 14 years ago

I suspect there's an opportunity/lesson lurking here somewhere.

One of the biggest complaints devs have about tools is responsiveness. The more responsive a tool is, the higher time-density of information available to a developer.

IDEs tend to suck in this regard, but Vim positively shines. Many people advocate Vim because it tends to shine in this department, even though they may not consciously realize it. Responsiveness seems to be the one vital attribute for developer tools in general. (Mosh is another example of a dev tool that capitalizes on responsiveness.)

So at first glance, it's quite odd that many IDEs suck re: responsiveness. After all, this is measurable. However, the tools to measure this on desktop apps tend to be proprietary and quite involved to use. As a result, FOSS developer tools don't do this kind of measurement, and the Tragedy of the Commons results in bloated IDEs. So the environments that avoid poor responsiveness tend to be ones that matured in a world with far fewer resources.

The takeaway: if your plans for world domination also involve a dev environment to rule them all, you'd best be measuring UI responsiveness as a part of your continuous integration/testing -- and set standards and make the devs stick by them.

zanny• 14 years ago

I have Eclipse, Netbeans, Monodevelop, and Geany right now on 12.04. And besides having some ridiculous start up times (like, ~10 seconds, then again I have this test 12.04 partition on an old IDE hard drive from 2001. "shades" I must just be a daredevil...) they are pretty snappy, and I imagine any responsiveness shortfalls are JVM disk IO, so an old IDE drive with 60 mb sequential read / write is about as bad as it gets, and I don't lose productivity to slow software with them.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

Does emacs have a consistent grammar like this?

I use vim, but have been interested in learning emacs too. However, every time I startup the emacs tutorial, I immediately start missing the vim's semantic grammar.

Have I just not gotten far enough into emacs to discover that yet?

silentbicycle• 14 years ago

Not as such, though many commands can be prefixed by a "universal argument" count; "C-u 5 C-n" means "move forward 5 lines", just like "5j" does in vi.

In Emacs terminology, many vi commands can be followed by a movement command, in which case they act on the region from the current point to where the movement ends up. Instead of saying "dw" (delete forward-word), you'd use something like "C-space (mark position) M-f (forward-word) C-w (kill-region, AKA 'cut'). There are many semantic movement commands, acting on the space travelled just isn't automatic.

donniezazen2• 14 years ago

Do you guys use a mix of VIM and Text editor? OR just VIM?

johncoltrane• 14 years ago

What do you mean? Vim is a text editor.

donniezazen2• 14 years ago

With a text editor I meant something like Gedit.

The Grammar of Vim

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